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December 14, 2003
FlexWiki: Project by David Ornstein at Microsoft
Posted by Clay Shirky
Found while reading about Ward moving to Microsoft:
FlexWiki, a Wiki written by
David Ornstein, program manager on Longhorn.
It's a nice enough wiki, skinned WinXP-style, but it is as usual so encumbered with client-side assumptions that it doesn't work on the Mac, even in IE. (Update: Drew Aramchek points out that many wikis support locating orphaned pages. It's a feature I've never used, so I wrongly believed it was novel in FlexWiki.)
The only really novel feature I could find in a short period of playing (after digging out my old Windows laptop) was a Lost+Found section, analogous to the Unix feature, where pages with no inbound links are listed. This seems unwiki-ish to me, but as a project management tool, I can see how someone might want to keep track of what's being gardened. (Hmm -- 'gardening' as a transitive verb. Maybe the feature should be called MulchPile?)
And of course, the feature set of the world's N+1th wiki is not the news. The news is that a PM on Longhorn is implementing a wiki.
Comments (3)
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1. drew on December 15, 2003 5:31 AM writes...
In fact, orphaned pages are quite often tracked by default in wikis, including MoinMoin, Meatball, and Ward's.
Permalink to Comment2. drew on December 15, 2003 5:33 AM writes...
Moin example: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/OrphanedPages
Meatball:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?OrphanedPages
Ward's:
http://c2.com/cgi/orphanWikiPages
(Perhaps the comment page template should include a notice that it strips all html, including links)
Permalink to Comment3. David Ornstein on December 16, 2003 11:51 PM writes...
The other cool things about FlexWiki is the way it handles a collection of closely-related Wikis running on a single server. It uses namespaces to allow the names of these different wikis to easily hook up to each other without people writing content really needing to know much about it. Important when you have lots of projects with varying degrees of overlapping pages.
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