In my explorations of ContentManagementSystems I've discovered that even though I get very frustrated with the limitations of most WikiSoftware, I keep coming back to them because they do more right than anything else. In an attempt to distill what is important about wiki to the Drupal MailList I wrote the below text. -- AdamShand
Trying to boil it down, the key concept of Wiki (which means "quick" in Hawaiian) is that the barriers to creating content should be as minimal as possible.
Thus a "true wiki" has these characteristics (this is a simplification and probably up for debate but ... ):
Anyone can edit any page simply by clicking the "Edit" link. Security is typically done by making changes easy to spot (their is a RecentChanges which works similar to Drupal's tracker module only it lists *all* changes).
The have a simplified markup system which the CMS converts to HTML. Thus the end user doesn't have to learn HTML (and I find wiki-markup easier while writing then HTML as I don't have to worry about closing tags "</>"). Here's one discussion on wiki syntax (note that exact syntax tends to vary slightly from wiki to wiki).
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?TextFormattingRules
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiSyntaxWiki's do something called accidental linking. When you SmashWordsTogether you automatically create a link. Lots of people hate the CamelCase look and feel but what's nice about is is that it becomes very easy to make your content Intertwingly. For example I use my wiki to keep my technical documentation and I refer lots of friends to pages which I've written to help them. Thus if I write a page about Drupal and mention MySql there is automatically a link to the page I've written with all my notes about MySql.
When actually talking about wiki's it becomes confusing. Along with being a CMS system there's a psuedo zen philosophy that tends to go along with them, for a classic example see the mind wipe pages which happened on the original wiki:
Now as far as what Wiki's have to do with Drupal I see three things that I think Drupal could learn and benefit from wiki:
- Lowered barriers to entry. I love that wiki invites people to participate, you don't have to create an account you don't have to jump through any hoops to participate. You just click "edit". This does mean that you should have good soft security measures in place (primarily revision control).
- Increasing intertwingliness (I have no idea how you're supposed to conjugate that word :-). Using normal CMS's systems it's laborious to constantly interlink and interconnect your content. Wiki's make this easy, and in fact it happens without even thinking about it. I think the glossary module is a great step in this direction.
- Easier data entry. I find HTML distracting when I'm trying to write, and I don't like that I have to worry about things like closing tags in my entries in order to generate valid HTML.