Journalism experiment and recovering from a ZiddlyWiki disaster

I was asked to write a special report on a topic I can’t disclose yet. I’ve already sent preliminary e-mails to people I would be interviewing. I had planned to do all my note-taking using ZiddlyWiki. While finalizing my notes it occurred to me: why not give the people I would be interviewing read-only access to my wiki? After all, the topic I’m writing about isn’t controversial – where people might try to influence you on how your draft article is shaping up.

I immediately set up a new wiki for the notes. I had previously hosted my notes in my main wiki. ZiddlyWiki allows you to easily create multiple wikis, you just had to copy the index_html file and place it where you want the new wiki to be hosted.

I created a new sub-folder and placed the index_html file there. I, however, forgot to create a tiddlers folder in the new subdirectory. Because of this, the subdirectory was using the tiddlers of my main wiki and when I started deleting notes not related to the article – I also deleted these notes from my main wiki. The disaster would have been complete had I not saved a copy of my main wiki in another sub-folder. I was able to partly reconstruct my main wiki using data saved in the abandoned sub-folder.

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2 responses

  1. Deleted tiddlers aren’t really deleted. They’re simply tagged as “deleted”. You can enter the Zope Management Interface, navigate to the tiddlers folder, and open each one up. From there, you can click the “Properties” tab and remove the “deleted” tag from each one. All is not lost. 🙂

  2. Was trying to figure out your wiki nga, eh. didn’t know how to input my replies. kaya, back to email.

    pero interface looks okay. would like to see how collaborating works on your wiki.

    mabu-hey!

    ka edong

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