Wiki

Wikit

29 Sep 2005 - Which software powers this wiki?

This Wiki uses WubWikit, a descendant of Wikit.


A good introduction to wiki

This page probably gives the quickest introduction to it all::

Wiki Wiki is the Hawai'ian term for "quick". Ward Cunningham is the one who coined the phrase of "Wiki Wiki Webs". The idea is that you edit pages in normal text mode, with a simple way to add new pages and hyperlinks between them.

It all works via CGI on a web server, so anyone with a web browser anywhere in the world can browse, follow links, and edit these pages.


List of all wikis on the Internet

For a few links to Wiki stuff, look at:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb The Wiki Wide Web http://markhobley.yi.org/wiki/howto.html How To Use Wiki (gkubu 2012-06-03 broken link, wayback machine: [L1 ])

A list of implementations of Wiki webs, including such important ones as MoinMoin and ZWiki, is at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiClones .

For a very very complete list of wiki engines available for download in all sorts of programming languages, click here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines . We are talking here of internet and personal wikis.

For a list of personal wikis written in all programming languages, click here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PersonalWiki .

Other Wikis include:

There are also lots of wikis on intranets that you can't see.


Books on Wiki

CL authored an introduction to Wikis [L2 ] in 2001 and recommends the reader comments on the Amazon page [L3 ] on The Wiki Way for insight on, well, "The Wiki Way".

A number of books have been written on the idea of Wikis:

  • Wiki: Web Collaboration
  • The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web
  • Wikis For Dummies
  • Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration
  • Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms
  • Building the knowledge management network
  • Collaboration and wikis and blogs, Oh My!
  • The complete idiot's guide to knowledge Management

and so on.

A Wiki book on Tcl: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl


The Sparrow and the Slashdot projects

There is an internal project at Xerox Parc called "Sparrow" [L4 ], which adds a fascinating new dimension to Wiki, by allowing users to edit portions of a standard HTML page:

escargo 30 Aug 2007 - The Xerox links are now broken, but http://www.parc.com/contact/xerox/sparrow/ now says, "Xerox has integrated Sparrow Web into their DocuShare CPX product and is no longer selling it as a stand alone product."

Slashdot has had a similar concept for some time with Everything [L6 ], but implemented as a sort of learning network, with the "strength" of links dependent on how often they're traversed.

escargo 30 Aug 2007 - It appears the link for Everything no longer works. Using the Internet Archive Wayback machine, the last version they had recorded was in October, 2003. That forwarded me to http://everything2.com/ that claims to be [email protected].


The four meanings of Wiki

"Wiki" can be understood in at least four senses:

  • The architecture and user interface Ward first defined. Once you've learned this as a Wiki user, you know it (like riding a bicycle) and you can easily accommodate minor extant variations.
  • A particular application OR toolkit which implements one or several Wikis. The first Wiki was implemented in Perl. There are now multiple Perl Wikis, a Python Wiki, a Tcl Wiki, and so on.
  • An instance of a collaborative document collection implemented with a particular Wiki toolkit. The Wiki you're reading now is implemented in Tcl, and also happens to have Tcl as its subject.
  • ...

The Tcl article on Wikipedia

Wikipedia [L7 ] is an ambitious attempt to collect much of the world's wisdom in a Wiki. RS has added needed details from the Tcl scene to http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Tcl - check it out, make it better. (Of course, this is still the real Wiki, but some visibility in a highly frequented general Wiki can't hurt either...)

rdt Great work (as usual), however; Under 'Symbols with a special meaning', I would have said: '# comment (only as the first word of a command)'.

LV I would presume there is a way for you to make that comment there, right?


Plato Notes

The Wiki culture and practice reminds me of Plato Notes files [L8 ], although the mechanisms are much different. escargo 11/11/2002


See also TickleWiki.


Wiki for managers

Incidentally, if you need help explaining Wiki to someone on the management side, "Wiki goes to work" [L9 ] and its precursors might serve you.


TCL/TK wikis

Several independent Wikis are likely to interest readers of this one, including the

  • French-language Tcl-focused Wiki [L10 ]
  • Agile Process Control Wiki [L11 ] (gkubu 2012-06-03 broken link)
  • Tkinter Wiki [L12 ]
  • schtonk [L13 ] is an application wiki done in TCL
  • SoftWiki is an experimental project for collaborative editing of entire web pages and web sites, rather than content within a page. Each page is a CGI script authored in Tcl, called via an init script which executes the CGI code within a safe interpreter extended with custom code that limits access to OS resources. Source code: [L14 ]

LV Early in my life I fell in love with Ted Nelson's Xanadu writings - see http://xanadu.com/ for his official web site. In the early days of the wiki, I thought of this as being conceptually similar. I don't know whether I still think that...