I recently deployed a fedwiki farm for my team after playing with it myself and catching just a whiff of the possibilities. I had a litany of complaints myself, but was compelled to press on due to the intriguing promise of the goals of the project.
While some issues stem from the fundamental design of tracking individual paragraphs, I believe many of the problems will be designed away with better client side programming or alternative UIs in time. With this rollout of fedwiki on the original wiki, I now think all the issues will be defended or fixed sooner than I thought.
Could you explain a bit more about the issues with tracking paragraphs? It sounds like an interesting idea.
From perusing the GitHub documents briefly, it seems like the architecture is such that other UIs should be possible. Do you have a hunch about the possibility of making, say, an Emacs client?
Because of drag/drop refactoring and the detail in the page journal, they have to track the history of every paragraph, which requires UI for interacting with individual paragraphs. You can't have just a big old textbox for the whole page and do things as we always have (maybe you can get close with the right diff algorithm).
So to edit a paragraph in the current UI you have to double click to get an edit box, then click to insert the cursor in the right spot. Adding a new paragraph requires a few clicks. Adding a new page and getting to that first edit box requires too many clicks.
Drag/drop as the primary mouse interaction also makes it hard to copy/paste text in and out of the wiki.
It's painful if you're used to orgmode.
But like I said, these are just UI gripes. You can see how they fall out of the fundamental design of the system, but I think focused client design could optimize editing and make it more familiar if that was a goal.
I started playing with it last night. It looks like the was a significant fork a few months back that separates the client from the server. Conceivably, you could take the client and figure out how to build a different UI.
I recently deployed a fedwiki farm for my team after playing with it myself and catching just a whiff of the possibilities. I had a litany of complaints myself, but was compelled to press on due to the intriguing promise of the goals of the project.
While some issues stem from the fundamental design of tracking individual paragraphs, I believe many of the problems will be designed away with better client side programming or alternative UIs in time. With this rollout of fedwiki on the original wiki, I now think all the issues will be defended or fixed sooner than I thought.