[PWS] PWS only meant for Swiki?

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Mon May 3 13:50:12 UTC 1999


>By the way, as one who has only recently become alive to the virtues
>of PWS and built-in Swiki support, let me humbly state what a big
>deal this stuff is.  The amount of functionality for the effort to
>build one is amazing, and the extensibility is unparalleled.

That last point continues to amaze me.  The cool inventions using the Swiki
that teachers come up with are tremendous!

>I am curious how, in practice, a Swiki performs.  In particular, how
>practical are these things for communities of several hundred people?

Ward can answer for the WikiWikiWeb.  My class Swiki (we call it a CoWeb --
easier to explain to students without invoking Hawaiian :-) regularly hosts
over 100 very frequent users.

FYI, I've just written a paper for AERA (American Educational Research
Association) on a survey of users, exploring issues of usability,
motivation, and learning.  http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/papers/aera99/

>
>And one simple, silly (in the sense I should probably be able to
>figure this out for myself without much effort) question.  Since
>Swikis keep lots of past information available to support rollback of
>pages, how do I control the bilge when I am comfortable that I have a
>stable state?  In particular, how can i get my Swiki to dump old
>information?  Will Swiki automatically dump rollbacks after a fixed
>number of edits?

No, the Swiki won't automatically dump roolbacks, but there are variety of
commands that Ted built for trimming the load.

I should say: I've never used them.  My class CoWeb is well over 1300 web
pages now, after over a year of use.  The whole thing, with every version
of every page saved, is 50M.  And in just a mere 40 years, I'll have to
move off of the too-small-too-buy-a-replacement 2 gig disk that it's now
residing on.  Disk space is just SOOOO cheap!

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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