THL Toolbox > Workflow Issues > Sakai Collaborative Worksite Technology > Current Issues & Questions With Sakai Installation > Wiki Problems And New Features Needed
Wiki Problems And New Features Needed
Formatting issues
Internal formatting seems very limited, and the documentation is poor and/or hard to understand.
Can you use HTML tags of any type in the WIKI?
Refresh icon at top of WIKI pages goes to home page. This is obviously an error - there is already a home link to the WIKI home, and it is counter intuitive for refresh to take you out of your current page and go back to WIKI home. Yes I realize that you can click on the breadcrum for the current page and get a refresh of it, but in my exp everyone is trying to do that with the refresh button.
It would be good to be able to block indent like for citations, etc.
It would good to be able to have lists indented with lists - i.e. two levels of lists so within a list you could have an indented sublist off one list item.
The headers do not clearly differentiate from each other visually - which makes no sense. What is point of having headers of various levels if there is no visual indication of which header is subordinate?
Its unclear what the best practice is to create paragraphs. is it just to leave a blank line between paragraphs? I understand how to insert a forced line break, but you are discouraged from doing too often. If you want to write verse where you want lines broken but without empty lines between them, should you just put the two slashes after each line of verse?
It would be nice if you could create an automatically alphabeticized list (maybe asking too much).
It would be neat if we came up with ways to insert semantic markup that could then be the basis of automated conversion of WIKI documents to valid TEI documents. This could be as simple - though cumbersome - as having some way to insert tags that don't show up in the WIKI so that the WIKI can be used as a WIKI without being littered with tags in the non-editing view, but still carry the tags so that on the other end can be easily converted into some form of semantic markup like TEI. For example, say that {text title begin} was inserted, and anything between {} was suppressed from display by the WIKI.
It would be great if there keyboard macros to do things like apply bold, italic, etc. But I realize the whole idea of macros may just be fundamentally incompatible with the program.
General frustrations
1. The "help" links to the right are really irritating. great for first time users, but a waste of space for people who use the WIKI frequently. the problem is when you hide it, its a one time editing session only hide. they reappear immediately. there needs to be a way to turn those off so you can have a big editing window. coudl you put it in your preferences so one could turn it off forever either in the site setting, or in one own's private settings? Also could you move a link to the WIKI help page on to the top bar of editing options where it says resource link, etc.? that way even if you had the side bar thing deleted there is still an omnipresent link to the WIKI help if you need it. Yes I know I can edit the right hand side help and just delete it - but there there is no obvious link to WIKI help for those who need it.
2. When you use a WIKI from one worksite in another worksite, and want to edit it from the latter work site, that works fine. However the breadcrumbs include the long global URL making them very diffiuclt to use. I find that the breadcrumbs are a crucial help in efficiently navigating in the WIKI. Any chance that the global URL could be deleted from the breadcrumbs? thanks.
Bugs
The public view of the WIKI has some problems:
- Here the header DOES occur, even though it has vanished from COLLAB. However it appears in a grayed out font and small. Thus it is much smaller and apparent than any headers you use. Thus the resultant page looks quite strange. Can we simply delete this so it is like the itnernal appearance of WIKIs?
- The public view lacks any breadcrumbs, or the simple home link. This makes navigation quite hard. Is it possible to expose in public automatically the home link, and the breadcrumbs?
- I tried to turn on public edit, but I can't seem to get that to work though its in the settings.
- There is no way to figure out from the public view what the original WIKI was so you can give feedback to someone for editing. We need a way to find out the worksite etc. info so that it can be easily traced back to the location where it can be edited.
When you import a WIKI from another worksite, it definitely imports it all because if I put in one of the WIKI names it links fine. But when I go to the WIKI tab after import - nothing at all displays. It only displays if I manually type in the imported WIKI names. So there is deifnitely a glitch here. I have now done it four times over 2 weeks - never once worked right.
Also the importation of the WIKI screws up the permissions, so that it is reduced set of permission fields.
