On wiki essence
Replying to Joe Audette. I landed on his blog - I have no idea how or why. He was asking what is the essence of a wiki, something I’ve pondered a lot on.
I’m a huge fan of wikis, have been since my early days discovering c2 six or seven years ago. One feature that hasn’t been mentionned yet is backlinks. Usually, you can click the title of the page and automatically get a list of pages linking to the current one.
Another feature, although I tend to deprecate it, is WikiWords, using CamelCase. It sounds very convenient, but you quickly learn that a page name isn’t necessarily the best choice for the text used to link to it. WikiWords flatten the distinction between the link text and the URL. I prefer to use simple markup such as [Example page | this is an example page] for example.
About wysiwyg editing and markups in general, first here’s a nice editor called wikiwyg that you can test right away.
There are at least five solid options to accomplish this nowadays, such as FCKeditor that was mentionned. I tried dozens of wiki markups, lately been leaning on reStructuredText. But a conversation with my good friend Yannick recently revealed that xhtml should probably always be used, except maybe for links and special macros (Table of content, etc.)
Oh, let’s not forget Recent Changes (with RSS for bonus points), marking minor changes, the fact that most wiki articles aren’t signed but belong to everyone and Interwiki, to let you easily link to other wikis and websites. Someone mentionned the ability to create new pages, this is a must too.
Once you have a few wiki features at your disposal, you find you can recreate a lot of functionnality you’re used to have. c2 had folksonomy way back in 1995, using category pages, for example.
Update 2005-09-21: see also Eugene Eric Kim’s post on wiki essence.
I totally agree with you, wikis are some of the most powerful tools on the Internet. Wikipedia is a good example of how good it can be, and now even other projects are using wikis for their knowledge base or documentation.
Comment by icez — 2005/08/23 @ 09:32
I love wikis. I’m totally sold out to MoinMoin which might be unfortunate, but it is for me the most powerful and flexible wiki out there. It supports reStructuredText and has been enhanced with a wysiwyg editor in the 1.5 release. It has of course all the other features you mention. One thing missing, however, is section editing, but i think it’s getting there.
Comment by TheAnarcat — 2006/01/29 @ 19:05
Speaking of reStructuredText, I recently discovered Nabu, by a Montreal programmer, Martin Blais. It adds a data extraction layer to reST, exactly what I was hoping for, to make a wiki more database like. I hope to get him to give us a presentation, maybe in April. Stay tuned.
Comment by Robin Millette — 2006/01/29 @ 20:16