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WikiWikiWeb



Hi,

After hearing about WikiWikiWeb from Ilan at the Friday meeting, I set 
out to find what the hell this WikiWikiWeb thing is.

Those of you who have seen Slashdot's Everything will find this
somewhat familiar, and indeed Eevrything is listed as one of the
WikiWiki clones, albeit one that is more structured and limited. The
basic concept, as Ilan said, is that there are pages, and on the
bottom of each page there's an "Edit" link which simply brings you a
form, with all the page's text in a textarea form element, and lets
you edit it to your whim. No login, no password, you just edit the
page and save. What people usually do is add their own comments to the
page, or fix mistakes in the page. There's no inhenrent chronological
ordering in Wiki as there is in a weblog; each page is the composition 
of what everybody thinks the page should be.

But WikiWikiWeb is not just a static structure of web pages, each one
of which can be edited. It's called a "Web" for a reason, and that is
because new pages in Wiki are created just by mentioning their
name. What do I mean? If you write a word using the right
capitalization, it becomes a link to a page by that name. Just like
Everything's square brackets. The right capitalization is adding a few
capitalized words together, as in "LinuxRules" or "WikiWikiWeb" or
"FirstnameLastname". After you edit the page and save it, all these
words become links to their pages, which you can edit too. Thus, you
start with one page in the WikiWikiWeb, and then it grows
exponentially as it mentions concepts that get their own pages, and
these pages do too, et cetera.

As I said, it is similar in concept to Slashdot's Everything, or
apparently, the other way around. The difference is that in Everything
the structure is much more rigid, only specially designated boxes on
the page are for user-editable text, and even then, only two such
boxes exist on each page, and only the users who created them can
later edit them. The similarity is in the almost-automatic new node
creation concept, and thus the disordered but linked collection of
information.

You can take a look at it yourself at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki, which is 
probably the first WikiWikiWeb; its topic seems to be design patterns
in object-oriented software.

Although I don't think that putting the whole Linux-IL site under Wiki
makes sense, IMHO creating a Wiki area on the site as a general
"knowledge base" is an extremely good idea. Faq-O-Matic is also a good
idea, but I find it pretty confusing. In any case, it's definitely a
technology the site creators would want to evaluate.


-- 
Alex Shnitman                            | http://www.debian.org
alexsh@hectic.net, alexsh@linux.org.il   +-----------------------
http://alexsh.hectic.net    UIN 188956    PGP key on web page
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Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence ...
that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by Open Source projects.
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