User talk:Ahakim

ACL Handbook

Hi Ali,

I see you are working on a Conference Handbook. It looks good so far.

I have a small suggestion. You need to tie together all of the Wiki pages that are part of the Conference Handbook. As it is now, a person who stumbles upon one of the sub-pages (e.g., by searching) will not understand the context of the sub-page (i.e., that it is a sub-page of the main page Conference Handbook).

I suggest three things to tie the pages together:

(1) For each sub-page (excluding the main page Conference Handbook), add "(Conference Handbook)" in parentheses to the title of the page. For example:

• State of the art (main page)
• Parsing (State of the art) (sub-page)

You can change the titles of the existing pages by using the "move" tab.

This convention makes it clear that Parsing (State of the art) is a sub-page of State of the art, rather than a general page on Parsing.

(2) At the bottom of each page, add the category "Conference Handbook". For example, see the bottom of each State of the art page. Furthermore, you should insert a little bit of text into the category page itself. For example, see Category:State of the art.

(3) At the top of each sub-page, add a brief mention that the sub-page is part of the Conference Handbook and provide a link to the main page. For example, see Phonology software, which links to the main page Tools and Software.

These changes will connect the Conference Handbook pages together. I have seen all three of these conventions in use at Wikipedia. --Pdturney 11:30, 1 July 2007 (EDT)

Another option would be to put everything on one page (or a small number of pages), instead of having many separate sub-pages. --Pdturney 11:33, 1 July 2007 (EDT)

Restricting Access

Drago would like to restrict access to the handbook pages to a small group of users. Is this possible in a wiki? If not, my plan was to create a separate wiki. Thanks. --Ahakim

I guess the best (simplest, least messy) option for restricting access would be to create a separate wiki. However, I would like to question the idea of restricting access. It seems to me that this is contrary to the whole spirit of wikis. Is it really necessary to restrict access? I assume that there is no secret information, so this is a question of write-access, not read-access (that is, anybody should be able to read the ACL Handbook). So why should we deny write-access to registered users of the ACL Wiki? All changes to the wiki are logged in the "history" tab for each page, and it is always possible to revert to earlier versions of a page: no information is ever lost. Since users of the ACL Wiki must log in to edit, we will have an email address associated with every change. We can see changes in the Special:Recentchanges page, which I check on a regular basis, so no change will go unnoticed. It seems to me that no harm can come from allowing any registered user of the ACL Wiki to edit the ACL Handbook. In fact, some good may come from it: some users may have some helpful changes to suggest. --Pdturney 11:12, 2 July 2007 (EDT)