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@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html