Wander 2017-06-07

Today, as other days, I visited the Federated Wiki chat at riot.im . Conversations in May were exploring improvements to a five star rating plugin for wiki. The conversation betrays deep thinking by all participants: thoughtful, and specific questions; links to code improvements to the plugin itself; and Ward's experimental review website. FANTASTIC!

Below I use wiki's reference links to specific points of inspiration. However, the full experience of Ward's experiment needs to begin with his site as the origin. He has some changes to plugins to support the experiment which I do not have installed here. http://best.ward.bay.wiki.org

Ward offers an example where he uses the "ward-cunningham" page to describe how he constructed the example site for experimenting with the five-star plugin.

We rate cities around the world and then roll up the ratings into a single file. Mostly this is an experiment to use the new multi-dimensional features of the FiveStar plugin.

Such a timely example. Wiki is a place to work, not just talk about work. Ward has done his own work and left a map that I can follow in my own work. The work, and the meta-work are each deep work.

We will adapt the ideas of pattern languages to what we call workflows. Each step makes something. We document those things and the flows among them.

I was especially intrigued by the graphviz plugin. With pen on paper, I enjoy creating concept maps to see and think through and untangle or entangle my own thoughts. A few years ago I began creating a javascript based concept-map editor in hopes that I might smooth the transition from my paper maps to digital artifacts. https://github.com/dobbs/concept-map

I recently applied graphviz to communicate network relationships for a complex distributed system. Based on that experience, I may well abandon my own concept-map editor, if graphviz can be made to represent the tangles I have on paper.

I had already been wondering how that concept-map editor might present itself as a wiki plugin. With all of that setup, have a look at this: a lineup of workflows . Of particular interest, click the "beam up" button to have graphviz connect the dots between the individual wiki pages in that lineup.