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orphaned page report
So our business WIKI is 120 pages and I am getting concerned about getting an unmanageable nest :-)
As a developer I am used to the following reports:
- Orphaned pages (ones that aren't linked to)
- Used by (this page is referenced by)
- Complete list of external links
And these available as pretty html (see all pages) and raw text (delimeted)
I am new to PBWiki and may have missed that these exist already.
Cheers,
JAC.
p.s. didn't even realise I have moved away from pbwiki when I clicked support.
As a developer I am used to the following reports:
- Orphaned pages (ones that aren't linked to)
- Used by (this page is referenced by)
- Complete list of external links
And these available as pretty html (see all pages) and raw text (delimeted)
I am new to PBWiki and may have missed that these exist already.
Cheers,
JAC.
p.s. didn't even realise I have moved away from pbwiki when I clicked support.
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The best point from the company
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Hi! One important area of focus post 2.0 launch is going to be producing a suite of "wiki gardening tools" that folks like you (and we internally!) can use to keep a wiki in good health and properly trimmed. Backlinks & Orphaned Pages Reports are one way to help gardening, but I'm not sure are necessarily the most effective for most people.
I think that "pages that are not often viewed" or "pages that haven't been edited in a long while" or some cross product thereof could be much more compelling indicators of material that is languishing and is either in need of an update or deletion.
We'll be doing a lot of experiments with giving admins like yourself these kinds of tools - hearing more examples of how you organize your wikis and what kind of tools you'd like to use to garden them will help us build the right thing. And hey - if backlinks and orphaned pages reports end up being the best thing, then so be it! We'll be listening. :)
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Inappropriate?Hi JAC,
These ideas have been thrown around a lot in PBwiki over the past year or so. Our CTO even created an implementation for backlinks that had to be disabled: the problem was that larger wikis (that number in the thousands) presented a huge load to the servers.and I'm not sure that we've sorted that out yet.
So I guess the short version of this is that we are aware that users want these features and they come up often in discussion, but they are currently unavailable.
Sorry I couldn't be more help!
Vu
P.S. Some enterprising users HAVE created their own versions of these stats. This wiki uses an awesome off-site Perl script: http://elothtes.pbwiki.com/Mindless+A...
I also have PHP code sitting around that I wrote a long time ago that would analyze backup .zip files from PBwiki and output this information. Both strategies require having access to your own server, but if you're interested, email me at vu.nguyen[at]pbwiki[dot]com
I’m the dorky tech support guy. Love me.
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?When you say "larger wikis (that number in the thousands)", do you mean that there are thousands of large wikis, or thousands of backlinks in a few large wikis?
I’m just curious how many "huge wikis" are holding the rest of us back on this feature
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Inappropriate?I personally don't have the stats on that, but from an engineering perspective, it's going to be a little bit of both: lots of wikis for which you have to manage backlinks, and a few large wikis for which you'll have to manage tons of backlinks.
I'm asking around about it, so thanks for piquing my interest as well! -
Inappropriate?Hi! One important area of focus post 2.0 launch is going to be producing a suite of "wiki gardening tools" that folks like you (and we internally!) can use to keep a wiki in good health and properly trimmed. Backlinks & Orphaned Pages Reports are one way to help gardening, but I'm not sure are necessarily the most effective for most people.
I think that "pages that are not often viewed" or "pages that haven't been edited in a long while" or some cross product thereof could be much more compelling indicators of material that is languishing and is either in need of an update or deletion.
We'll be doing a lot of experiments with giving admins like yourself these kinds of tools - hearing more examples of how you organize your wikis and what kind of tools you'd like to use to garden them will help us build the right thing. And hey - if backlinks and orphaned pages reports end up being the best thing, then so be it! We'll be listening. :)
3 people think
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?Why are you not sure they're most effective? As in, what data leads you to that conclusion?
These are standard tools in wiki software, and people, as evidenced by the post above, have come to expect them. Not having orphaned pages, at the very least, is a big hole in the suite of wiki tools. Orphaned pages are, in fact, an extreme version of pages not often viewed, are they not?
I’m flabbergasted
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?I definitely would love to see backlinks and orphans, but having used PBwiki so long, I've found that I've changed my strategy to always add the link first and then create the page afterwards, assuring that each page is linked once.
I'm not saying that it's a solution; it's just an observation of my own practices. -
Inappropriate?I gotta say, the idea that pbwiki does not attempt to keep links up to date is, well, stunning. It's been explained to me that this is a historical feature, that people are used to it. But when I consider letting general employees organically develop a company wiki, with no controls on linkage, I can foresee chaos. People are busy. Easily overlooked thing get overlooked.
There should be a system to prevent bad links, both at creation time and at rename/delete. Failing that, there should certainly be a way to list all bad links, so that someone can try to puzzle out what they were supposed to be.
Perhaps what's required is a vision shift: maybe the wiki is an ordered collection of links, with articles wedged between them!
I’m hopeful
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?I have just written a little app that takes a backup file and opens all the pages in the WIKI. At the moment I am using it to build a "table of contents" of the whole wiki. As an aside it manages this as every page has an "up link", linking it to its logical parent page. So be parsing all the pages you can work out a table of contents.
My next step is to extend it to check all links on all pages and add how many pages link to a page. -
Inappropriate?Anyone who wants to try my orphaned page report exe is welcome to try it, I can e-mail the exe over. It is designed for my up-links, but in so doing looks for orphaned pages. You will need to have a backup of the wiki unzipped on your hard disk.
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Inappropriate?Not sure if you've seen this, but I've written a C# app (can be found here http://elothtes.pbwiki.com/Mindless+Otto ) that will do the same thing, but downloads it directly from the wiki (you don't have to have the backup zip downloaded first). It also will post the results back to the wiki if you'd like.. additionally it's linked with the javascript virtual machine so you can put scripts on your page that can access the DOM I've defined internally to represent the full wiki and generate reports, the results of which can also be posted back to the wiki.
I've also got a version that will do all of these things but will parse a backup zip instead...
additionally I've created a copy utility that will transfer pages back and forth between wikis (and will convert between pbwiki 1.0 and 2.0), but that's a whole different story. -
Inappropriate?TIm,
You kindly helped me out with API stuff when I started looking, but I still haven't had time to do anything. Using the API is definately the next step as I want to put the headers in myself, rather than get users to do it and also build some kind of approval / page has been read system as we use the wiki as office handbook with director sign off and staff required to keep up to date.
I still need to get my head round C# (from Delphi) and this would be a better primer than sat in my office thinking of something to write in .NET.
Which of the tools have you released / shared the source for?
I am waiting on the company to decide if they are going to move to V2 instead of learning API programming in V1, just as they change.
JAC.
I’m noseless
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Inappropriate?feel free to grab my source from:
http://centuryoffire.pbwiki.com/f/ott...
it's got a pbwiki abstraction layer which manipulates the version 1 and version 2 apis through the same function calls. -
Inappropriate?Hi tim, Unzipped, double clicked (about my level in VS2008). Converted - as it suggested and go:
Warning 1 The referenced component 'ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib' could not be found.
Is this: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource...?
If so, I'll start on my steep VS learning curve.
Thanks a lot.
JAC.2 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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oops... I thought I stripped all the references to ICSharpCode..
that is the one, but it doesn't actually do anything..
(in the version that I didn't post it will read from a backup zip in addition to directly from the web site) -
just uploaded a new version that doesn't reference that library
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Inappropriate?Is there any news on the promised "gardening tools"? Finding orphaned pages would be an excellent feature. We're about to build what could be a very large wiki indeed, created by a lot of people new to this paradigm, and it would be helpful for their to be tools to allow us to keep an eye on things... (people may create new pages, but forget to link them like they're supposed to)
I’m confident
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