On 9/26/13, Guillaume Lerouge <guillaume(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
unfortunately I don't think XWiki offers the
features you're looking for.
I'm not even sure what you mean by "patron blindness" or "autonomous
agents" in the context of a wiki.
XWiki does support includes though.
What exactly is it you're trying to achieve in your system?
Sharing + Security. What everyone else fails at pathetically and have
pretty much given up on.
Okay, let's say you have a wiki with 100 MB of storage. You decide to
give access to it to 9 of your friends, giving 10 MB to each of them
to do with as they please and keeping 10 MB to yourself. Each of them
can make pages off of other pages in their own namespace, so
effectively they've each got their own wiki now. You are their patron
because you've given them resources and can revoke them at will,
nuking them when they misbehave.
However, each of them has immediately turned around and made
themselves a patron. By publicizing the first secret "password" that
gets to their account, which now hits a SECOND login script of their
own devising. And each of them has created10 clients with 1 MB of
storage which they're administering from what YOU see as basic private
accounts. One of those 1 MB accounts is now THEIR account, and the
others have been handed off to THEIR friends.
So far, it's exactly like if you sell off land, people can subdivide
it and sell it off in turn. Or if you give someone a key to a house,
they can make copies as needed for their family members. YOU do not
get to authorize each and every single person who uses a resource just
because you "own" the resource. We do not live in fucking Nazi fascist
totalitarian countries and *software security shouldn't be fucking
Nazi fascist either*! You can guess what I think of software
programmers for having created a Nazi state of affairs as "security"
and considering it perfectly adequate.
Eventually, as inevitably will happen, one of your clients will be lax
in their own admin'ing. So one of the people with a 1 MB account has
started posting pro-Nazi propaganda and recruiting neo-Nazis to post
more. You don't like this shit so you try to contact the guy you gave
that 10 MB space to in order to explain himself. He's on a vacation
and can't be arsed to explain himself. So you decide to nuke his
account, erasing everything in it. Which *is your right* and is
certainly a whole lot easier than trying to wade through and
surgically remove only the pro-Nazi shit, wasting your entire life
cleaning up other people's shit. And that's okay, because every single
last 1 MB client secured a fallback patron and their 1 MB of space
quota gets activated, thus they can trivially undelete everything you
nuked in one operation just under someone else's space. The main cost
they pay is they all have to look for and find yet another fallback
patron because their fallback patron just became their primary patron.
Of course, the Nazi guy ALSO did this but this time around he falls
under the purview of an admin who hasn't gone away and NOW he has to
explain himself. This new admin of his notices that *ALL* the guy does
is publish Nazi propaganda and so decides that on second thought he
doesn't care about the explanation and so just nukes the 1 MB account.
Now the Nazi guy is on a third patron, if he's secured one. Eventually
he runs out of patrons, or HIS patrons run out of patrons. Meanwhile,
everyone else is just slightly inconvenienced and their accounts
rearranged, but that's it. The upshot of all this is that the Nazi guy
is purged out of the system with nobody really going to any great
amount of effort to do so, and no great "collaboration" to do so
either.
This is about a third of what I'm trying to achieve. The other things
I'm trying to achieve is: implementing private and communal property
that actually works. And implementing democracy. You know, the basic
things that make it so that in real life, we don't have 1 owner = 1
country. Also known as tyranny, dictatorship or absolute monarchy.
Which no matter what veneer of benevolence you slap on it is *exactly*
what exists in collaborative software. In c2 wiki it started out
aiming at totalitarian communism but that failed, so there was a
knee-jerk aristocratic response which also failed. In wikipedia,
"jimbo" is a big fan of fascistic feudalism, so much so he dismisses
the peasants (the actual contributors) out of existence, considering
them non-entities. He thinks the aristocrats are the ones who matter
since every bit of property out there has been pissed on by an
aristocrat, and repeatedly so, and pissing on it is obviously the most
important contribution to agricultural lands.
I realize that adult politics, economics, and sociology (above the
level implemented by a typical 10 year old) are beyond the ken of
programmers, that's why I've labeled these basic features of everyday
adult life "esoteric".
Note that these aren't insoluble problems or even very hard problems.
I know exactly HOW to implement them, I just have too many even more
important priorities.
Best of luck in your search,
Thanks. At least I know this message made it to the list.