The example just has the typical "top to bottom" blog format: http://juliano.info/en/Blog:Memory_Leak
So I guess that's out.
A newspaper guild would make publishing easier, but wouldn't help with the "blog" part at all. Still, it's an interesting idea. aspirants would be "readers", members would be "writers", and elders would be "editors".
I don't know. It might collate articles in a traditional blog format, but click through to the posts themselves and you have just a normal wiki page that you can do anything with. That could work fairly well for newspapers. You can have a short summary on the main newspaper 'blog' for each new edition and then you click through to get the meat of the latest issue.
Tom, you're going way overboard with this. We don't need a full-fledged content management system to do wiki newspapers. All we need is someone who has a good knowledge of wiki authoring to make some templates, and write up instructions of how to use it. I created some very automated systems for the Dwilight Daily. I started trying to redo the TattleMaster with semantic forms and semantic data, but just couldn't make it lay out right with the semantic wiki template system. If someone could make that work, then you wouldn't need any coding at all.
In addition, I think you're trying to design a system that just doesn't fit the way that wiki newspapers are done. They are done blog-style because that's the way that content is created. With only one or two people working on a paper, you don't get complete "issues" released all at once. You get one article a week, not 6 or more where you have to lay it all out, and have headlining stories, with bylines and filler.
I've been a fairly heavy user of the BattleMaster wiki in my time. I can happily tweak and mess around with run of the mill templates and wiki markup to get the results I want. But I'm afraid using the semantic wiki was way over my head. It's too complicated for me. To be honest, I think you're about the only person who managed to get something going that really made use of it.
I really liked the way you had the Dwilight Daily running and I was intrigued by what you were trying to do with the Tattlemaster but I absolutely couldn't do something like that myself. I think we would, as you say, have to polish up some templates and get some instructions written up to see the automated systems you were using used by others.
