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Make it easy to rename pages.
Presently, if you want to rename a page, you generally have to remove the contents of the page (by the old name), and then make a new page with the new name.
What a hassle! But there are some even deeper problems.
One problem is that you lose your page history. Suppose you had 54 versions of the page FooBar. But you want to rename FooBar to FuBar. You copy the text of FooBar #54, then erase FooBar, and then write the text into FuBar #1. When people check the version history of FuBar, they don’t see anything! They just see that, one day, an entire conversation appeared on the page FuBar.
Another problem is that old links to the old page don’t point to the new page.
A wiki could make it so that the page history transfers to the new page name, and a “forwarding” page appears on the old page name. The forwarding page says, simply, “This page has renamed to XYZ.”
But the text is automatic- you don’t have to manually type it out.
Forwarding is generally nice, to prevent outside links, however, it may be annoying if you want to rename a page to use the name for another page.
You could transfer the history of the old name to the new name.
Or, you could have the new page’s history note that it is derived from the old page at version #N. Then have the old page read, “Transfered to page (name)” on it’s new version.
(This idea may be connected to BranchingPages (or ForkingPages): Instead of deleting the old page, keep it. The new page is now a forked version of the existant old page with a new name.)
Much of this will be rewritten into NumberedPages- IdeasToPlace #34
Pages could be numbered, not just named. This seemingly odd suggestion would actually solve quite a few problems.
If pages were numbered, name changes would be simple. Changing the name of the page would be just like changing the text of the page. The page history would stay exactly the same.
You could make it so that the URL of the page could be by either name or number. If you wanted your link to be permanent, you would link to the number, since the number will never change. If you wanted your link to be human, but temporary, you could link to the name. The human link is only temporary, because the name may change.
Number links could be used by the wiki internally when new pages are made. That is, links to a page are stored as numbers, not names. If you wrote LinkToAPage on another page, it would be stored internally as [[Link#534]]. When displayed, it would appear as LinkToAPage. Note that, when the name of the page changes, there is no updating trouble- wherever the display said LinkToAPage before, it would now say LinkToAnotherPage.
This could easily work across InterWiki as well; Wiki would occasionally (every few days) visit every wiki they link to, with a laundry list of page names to convert to numbers, and numbers to convert to page names.
Consulting a “snapshot” of the page database while saving could ensure that links never change targets just because of editing. But this could cause nonintuitive behavior.
Wikit has implemented numbered pages.
Swiki has numbered pages and page renaming.
I don’t like NumberedPages as a generic name for this feature. It seems to me that the main point is that the name of a page is just a property of the page, and not the identity of a page. The page’s unique identifier also doesn’t have to be a “number”; it might as well be a GUID or a timestamp. (Nitpicking.) --BrianTempleton
Yeah, it could be a GUID, but I think that NumberedPages communicates more than IdentifiedPages. – LionKimbro 2004-04-21
Wiki should ask one another, “Can you give me your url for the page named XYZ?” Because the page URL may be a number, not a WikiName.
Or, use an IntComm:LocalNameServer, and you’re set already.
I think it’s likely that page renaming happens in groups.
In my experience as a programmer, I find that when I rename things, I do so en masse. I am thinking about how to make a set of names consistent, and after a while, I get a list of names to change. Not just one.
If we rename wiki pages the same way, we’d probably want all of the renames to be part of one change, like AtomicCommits. That way, if people decided that they didn’t like the renames, they could all be repealed at once as well.
Choosing names for page can quickly become political (WikiKM:MakingWords).
Discussion is frequently attached to name efforts. We may want some way of tying a discussion to the page’s name itself.