drewp for 2008 February 22 (entry 0)

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Goals for a wiki system

Some goals for a better wiki system:

  • HTML markup only! No restructured text, ad-hoc formats, etc. The lock-in is so awful in all of today's wikis. WYSIWYG editors are mature now- users should be able to pick WYSIWYG or full html.
  • no training or external docs should be required to use all the features
  • don't lose my scroll position when I want to edit some text I'm looking at
  • encourage linking and creation of RDF data, probably with rdfa
  • immediately exploit those links and metadata with easy searching/filtering/etc. Use FOAF data to limit my search to pages written by people I know, etc.
  • keep the ownership clear (this is the opposite of some wiki philosophies). Spam cleanup should be very simple.
  • encourage edits and especially annotations

A common case seems to be "add a new page and list it in some existing TOC section". Another one is "add a new section (paragraph or more) to this page". Editing words within an existing section that you didn't write, that might be rare.

I still like tinymce, although nelix_ isn't a fan.

Wikis that I use (that I'm trying to be better than) are: twiki, zwiki, confluence.

Related: rdf blog engine ideas

Related: Tom Morris - How to build the perfect wiki

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