On 6 Mar 00, at 0:22, Peter Thoeny wrote:

> systems proves that it works well: The community is
> monitoring postings, non conforming text (if by mistake
> or by purpose) is usually corrected by other members in
> the community within a short time. This is a self
> regulating systems, not unlike the 5 family communities
> in the old Edo-period in Japan, that had the function to
> judge and police the member of the community.

This brings up an interesting question I always wanted to know the
answer to. Do we have any idea what the average wiki site size is
(in wiki pages)?

I'm concerned about the size of our wiki from a strictly performance
and organization standpoint. From my limited unix knowledge I
recall about 60 files per directory being a nice limit to keep
directory speed optimal. Large directories shouldn't get more than
a few hundred files in them or performance begins to significantly
degrade for all file system operations.

At last count, the joswiki has well over 1000 wiki pages (I believe it
was 1200 or 1300 last time I checked). I've been noticing some
pretty poor performance as a result.

I was wondering how other large wiki's handle this problem (if they
do handle it). Our users have rejected the use of wiki webs,
preferring to use a single web to store all wiki pages. I've been
working on a patch to reorganize the pages by subdirectories using
the first letter of the page name as a temporary fix. At the current
state though, I'm wondering of a database isn't a better solution.

BTW, for those with this size site, you need to be careful in using
the search feature of the Twiki. Grepping into such fat directories
will absolutely kill your webserver.

In addition, with such a large site, I've found that the self-regulating
community doesn't always work nicely. Many page edits go
unseen and we're having a lot of "orphaned page" problems.
Mostly due to pages authors want to abandon but can't because
there's no delete. I'm wondering about perhaps warning a user
when they've removed the last link to a page. And then putting the
orphaned page on a "bubble list". Then at some regular interval,
scanning the bubble list, and deleting ones without hits... sorta like
an auction of the orphaned page's popularity.

I would also be interested in any other ideas for automating self-
healing and self-organizing a wiki.

comments?

-iain