Elements Of Wiki Essence

Elements of WikiEssence:

• Simple markups for formatting instead of HTML (see TipsForBeginners and TextFormattingRules)
• No markups for links (pages, external links, images, ...)
• content is basically ego-less and time-less (it's not considered important who wrote it and when it was written)
• Hyperlinks appear when referred to (no need to create them).
• Encourages creation of hyperlinks, and always shows which ones are valid. (Showing dead links with '?' really encourages creative WordPlay.)
• RecentChanges (see also ForgetfulnessAsFilter)
• Loss of history (some wikis add a page history)
• Flat namespace (some wikis allow subpages or hierarchies)

Accidents of Wiki implementation:

• Wiki links being resolved by a CGI script.
• Wiki pages being stored
  • in the OS file system
  • in a database
  • as intranet wikis (or CorporateWikis)
  • as wikis without public access (http://www.wiki.org)
  • as Read Only Wikis

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See WikiEssence for discussion

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CategoryWiki