JoeAudette.com

I haven't had much experience with Wiki's, but I think you're on the right track. I believe the whole point of a Wiki is to allow anyone (read anonymous) to make changes to the content of a web site.  This not only includes changes to existing content, but adding new pages, links, etc.  This makes it incredibly easy for contributors to keep a site up-to-date.  If you have people that know what their doing, then they easily manage themselves.

However, I think I've read or at least imagined that content spammers love Wiki's, too.  In my opinion, I would offer the option of only allowing wikiness behavior to registered/authenticated users.  Still offer a totally open and anonymous editing mode for screaming purists, but offer a reasonable alternative to thwart spammers.

I totally agree with using a WYSIWYG editor like FCKeditor for content editing.  What is up will all that funky Wiki markup, anyway? ;)

Wiki Markup has its place.  The big key is that Wiki pages are connected to keywords/key-phrases and then heavily hyperlinked together.  This is often thanks to a combination of things, including easy link markup.  Browse through the Wikipedia or any other large Wiki and notice how many hyperlinks there how, how hyperlinks hold such a major position in the wiki, and how hyperlinks keep page authors from having to repeat information from other pages.

Some reading into the Wiki philosohpy if you are so inclined:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory

There's other crazy reading in the c2.com wiki for the bored software developer (being as the original Wiki was focused on Programming Design Patterns).

• Reverting to previous versions is vital.
• A wiki should be editable by anyone.
• A wiki should be sloppy.
• The self-policing nature of a wiki only works for wikis with large user bases or on intranets, access control is needed for less popular wikis.
• Wikis are more about content than style. WikiMarkup helps enforce this.
• Some wikis don't have a wysiwyg editor. This is bad.
• Some wikis have a full wysiwyg editor. This is bad.
• A good wiki wysiwyg editor would _only_ have "Toggle Link", "bold", "italic", "Toggle heading level" buttons. Any more and the user starts worrying more about style than content.
• WikiMedia is the most popular wiki. Implement a subset of it's WikiMarkup - A wiki should allow multi-word links, not just camelCase.

Thanks everyone for the feedback and links!

I guess my goal is to give a Wiki like option but not to make mojoportal into a pure Wiki. I definitely plan to a make it configurable such that you can require authentication for editing and versioning goes without saying it is a must.

FCKeditor does allow control over the toolbars so I can leave in or take out as many features as I want for the editor. It doesn't currently support LaTex so mathemeticians may not find what they need but maybe that can be contributed to the FCKeditor at some point. Multi word links are already possible in FCKeditor.

If you shouldn't have to worry about style it seems like a WYSIWYG is better than markup, certainly I would "worry" more in trying to figure out how to format things using markup so a WYSIWYG is better than markup from my point of view because if I want to format something I don't have to think hard which allows me to more easily focus on the content. Or is it that a Wiki wants to discourage any formatting so it makes it require special voodoo markup so people won't format things?  Implementing a markup language seems like a lot of work to implement poor usability.

Maybe Wikis frequently are sloppy but is that really a goal? Wikipedia doesn't look sloppy to me.

I think people get distracted by what I'd call superficial aspects of wikis (such as the public editablililty). More fundamental to me is that it is a linked-topic based serialization of content, unlike a blog which is time-based. I've written something about this here: http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2004/11/07/blogs-and-wikis-and-content-publishing Oh, and I HATE WYSIWYG editing of any type! You don't do users a favor by encouraging bad practices like using bold to indicate emphasis.

Hmm .. my url was stripped. You can google for "Blogs and Wikis and Content Publishing" if you're interested.

Its because you entered it using a wiki markup approach instead of just selecting the text in the WYSIWYG and clicking the link icon to add the url.
Looks like an interesting read, I'm going to read it now. Here is the link

I totally agree with your paradigm about thinking of it all in terms of a content publishing system or CMS. That is what I'm trying to accomplish with mojoPortal, make it configurable to support whatever features the user wants for what he is trying to do. If you want this content to be available as RSS just enable RSS, if you want people to be able to comment on it or have discussions about it just enable comments or discussion etc.

So what I'm trying to figure out is what features need to be there to satisfy most of the needs that make people choose a Wiki over other formats so that I can give those options.

hi joe

imho it's all about the easy linking as mentioned by WorldMaker

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 you can test at http://demo.wikiwyg.net/wikiwyg/demo/standalone/

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 a friend 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.

I used twiki for a long time, but nowadays I've been using WikiPedia and Drupal (not really a wiki), and I feel at a loss for creating easily links to pages within the wiki, specially the pages already not created (drupal's node=345 urls are really anti-wikiness).

While I do like the idea of having rich-editing (I'm just writing inside FCKEditor, right?) I still forward the case not for a true wiki markup but some text post-processing.

Let me show an example

In twiki I would write: My NewExperiments with finite element...

And after saving my page would appear

My NewExperiments? with...

Clicking in that link would create a new page on demand, automatically in edit mode.

This easiness for creating and linking content is really the power of the wikis.

Just my 2 cents,

Thanks everyone for all the info.

I had no idea about all the linking features like auto-creating pages and back links that are built into wikis.  I will have to investigate this further. So this is the feature why you need some kind of markup or post processing.

Sounds like this is an important feature to wiki users.

Still not sure I fully understand how it decides what words to suggest links to, is it just the camel case  words? Or are there also other pattern rules to decide what to make a magic link in the text?
I guess I should go study some of the wiki markup for wikipedia.

Maybe I should try and integrate FlexWiki into mojoPortal as a module, it licensed under the CPL so it should be ok to use it.  Might give a good jump start on implementing it.

FlexWiki definitely seems worth a look.  FWIW, it sounds like it might not work on the Mono runtime out-of-the-box.  I don't know how hard that will be to overcome.

From a roadmap perspective, if it were me, I'd merge your existing Forum, Blog, and Html Content modules, first.  That will make the existing code easier to maintain.  Then I'd add the wiki-specific features.  The auto-linking stuff would probably mostly be extensions to FCKEditor.

--Dean