So I've been tinkering with writing wiki articles.
The basic problem with the system here is that it isn't set up to insert cross-links easily, thus making the whole "wiki" thing dubious at best.
There is, it turns out, a way to do a cross-link. Highlight the word or phrase you want to act as a link. Click the little link button. Enter the URL of the ChefTalk wiki page: www.cheftalk.com/wiki/TERM. Then, and this is crucial, click the "Target" tab, and scroll through the options to "Same Window," which will prevent it from opening a new window when you click the link.
It doesn't seem to check in advance to be sure that the link is viable. This means you can assemble a page without having already written every linked-to wiki entry.
What Some Programmer Type Should Do:
1. Have the page compiler read some sort of bracket --- something like ??TERM?? that has no other obvious meaning --- as "a href="www.cheftalk.com/wiki/TERM target=self } TERM { /a" . That way every time you type ??WORD?? it automatically creates a crosslink to the stated page. One could of course then manually alter the page in question.
2. Have the page compiler ping these links to see whether they refer to something or not. If not, color them red. Then, if someone clicks on a red link, it should say "there is no entry with the title TERM, do you want to create it now?" and if you say yes, leap to a new "create wiki" space for TERM.
If these things were in place, we could really turn those articles into a proper wiki, where every time you type (or spot and edit) a technical term of whatever sort, you just bracket it with the ?? or whatever bracket and it cross-references, allowing people to surf through the wiki. Currently, there are far too many articles with useless titles like "Making XXX," where they should be called "XXX," but if we start using true crosslinks this will blur out quickly enough --- you just create a redirect page if there's no other way, and it'll work smoothly.
I'm no programmer --- been 20 years since I did anything much --- but I'm pretty sure this isn't tricky HTML. Anybody out there have a hankering?
