Wiki software

Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application) is

collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create
and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system
is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The
content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file
system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management
system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that
web hosting facilities offer.

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 Homepage of Wikipedia on mobile,
which runs on MediaWiki, one of the
most popular wiki software packages

There are dozens of actively maintained wiki engines. They vary in the
platforms they run on, the programming language they were developed in,
whether they are open-source or proprietary, their support for natural
language characters and conventions, and their assumptions about
technical versus social control of editing.

History
The first generally recognized "wiki" application, WikiWikiWeb, was
created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham, and
launched on c2.com in 1995.[1] "WikiWikiWeb" was also the name of the
wiki that ran on the software, and in the first years of wikis' existence there
was no great distinction made between the contents of wikis and the
software they ran on, possibly because almost every wiki ran on its own
customized software.

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 Wiki software originated from older version control systems used for
documentation and software in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s these
generally had web browser interfaces. However, they lacked the ability to
easily create links between internal pages without writing HTML code. For
WikiWikiWeb, the CamelCase naming convention was used to indicate
internal links, without requiring HTML code.

By the time MediaWiki appeared, this convention had been largely

abandoned in favor of explicitly marking links in edited source code with
double square brackets. Page names thus did not interrupt the flow of
English and could follow the standard English capitalization convention.
Case insensitivity on the first letter but not subsequent letters supported
standard English capitalization conventions and let writers author their
pages in ordinary English, with the linking of particular words and phrases
afterward. This proved to be the critical change that allowed ordinary
authors of English to write wiki pages, and non-technical users to read
them. This policy was extended to other natural languages, avoiding the
use of unusual-looking text or awkward capitalization that violates the
language's own rules.

Over the next 10 years, many more wiki applications were written, in a
variety of programming languages. After 2005, there began to be a move
toward increasing consolidation and standardization: many less-popular
wiki applications were gradually abandoned, and fewer new applications
were created. Relatively few of the wiki engines currently in use were
created after 2006.

Some content management systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint, have

also adopted wiki-like functionality.

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 Data compatibility
In general new wiki engines have not followed the data formats (wiki
markup languages) of the existing engines, making them of limited use for
those who have already invested in large knowledge bases in existing
software. As a rule newer wiki projects have not succeeded in attracting
large numbers of users from the existing wiki software base.

The most well-known data format arguably is MediaWiki's, and

correspondingly has been reimplemented in other wikis:

WordPress has extensions to

display and edit MediaWiki-
format pages, and to frame
MediaWiki.
Jamwiki[2] is a MediaWiki
clone in Java, that supports
MediaWiki-format pages but

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 not extensions.
Other commercial projects or
clones often (or have in the
past) follow the MediaWiki
format. BlueSpice MediaWiki is
the only such software with a
free version available.
None of these alternatives support the extensions available under
standard MediaWiki, some of which extend or alter its data format.

In 2007 a project named (Wiki)Creole to create a standardized markup

language for wikis was completed. As of 2022, the effort has had
significant technical success, gaining support through implementation in
many engines,[3] but limited social success as it is still relatively unused
and unknown, has few cross-markup conversion tools for migrating
existing knowledge bases to it and no major engines use it as their native
markup syntax.

Types of usage

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 There are essentially three types of usage for wiki software: public-facing
wikis with a potentially large community of readers and editors, private
enterprise wikis for data management by corporations and other
organizations, and personal wikis, meant to be used by a single person to
manage notes, and usually run on a desktop. Some wiki software is
specifically geared for one of the usage types, while other software can be
used for all three, but contains functionality, either in its core or through
plugins, that help with one or more of the usage types.

Public wikis
Public wikis are usually open to the public to read, edit and comment on
some or all of the article space of each wiki. Many offer registration to
offer further access and controls to each user and a few have, in-part
commercialised aspects or further access, such as the popular wiki farm,
Fandom.

MediaWiki is by far the most dominant software as it powers Wikipedia,

consistently and by a large margin, the most visited public wiki,[4] it also
powers many other public wikis as well.[5] Other wiki engines used
regularly for public wikis include MoinMoin and PmWiki, along with many
others.[5]

Other Internet websites, based on wiki software, include encyclopedias

such as Sensei's Library, Parlia, and WikiTree.

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 Enterprise wikis
Enterprise wiki software is software intended to be used in a corporate (or
organizational) context,[6] especially to enhance internal knowledge
sharing. It tends to have a greater emphasis on features like access
control, integration with other software, and document management. Most
proprietary wiki applications specifically market themselves as enterprise
solutions, including Socialtext, Jive, Traction TeamPage and Notion.

Increasingly offerings appear which use the name 'wiki' but do not offer
basic elements common to established wikis, like Wiki Markup and Link-
first workflow as in Confluence (since 2018),[7] or Version Control of Full
Text Search Microsoft Teams.[8]

In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves

as enterprise solutions, including XWiki, Foswiki,[9] TWiki,[10] and
BlueSpice.[11] Some open-source wiki applications, though they do not
specifically bill themselves as enterprise solutions, have marketing
materials geared for enterprise users, like Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware[12] and
MediaWiki.[13] Many other wiki applications have also been used within
enterprises.

Among the many companies and government organizations that use wikis
internally are Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Intel, Microsoft, and the
United States intelligence community.

Within organizations, wikis may either add to or replace centrally managed

content management systems. Their decentralized nature allows them, in
principle, to disseminate needed information across an organization more
rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository.
Wikis can also be used for document management, project management,

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 customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and
many other kinds of data management.

Features of wikis which can serve an enterprise include:

Entering information into quick

and easy-to-create pages,
including hyperlinks to other
corporate information systems
like people directories, CMS,
applications, and thus to
facilitate the buildup of useful
knowledge bases.
Reduces e-mail overload.
Wikis allow all relevant
information to be shared by

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 people working on a given
project. Conversely, only the
wiki users interested in a given
project need look at its
associated wiki pages, in
contrast to high-traffic mailing
lists which may burden
subscribers with many
messages, regardless of their
relevance. It is also very useful
for the project manager to have
all the communication stored
in one place, which allows

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 them to link the responsibility
for every action taken to a
particular team member.
Organizes information. Wikis
help users structure
information into discoverable
and searchable categories.
These may arise from users in
a bottom-up way. Users can
create lists, tables, timelines
and other ways of expressing
order.

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 Builds consensus. Wikis allow
structuring the expression of
views, on a topic being
considered by authors, on the
same page. This feature is very
useful when writing
documentation, preparing
presentations, when author
opinions differ, and so on.
Access levels by rights and
roles. Users can be denied
access to view and/or edit
given pages, depending upon

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 their department or role within
the organization.
Knowledge management with
comprehensive searches. This
includes document
management, project
management, and knowledge
repositories useful during
times of employee turnover or
retirement.

Personal wikis
Software that is specifically designed for running personal wikis includes
Tomboy, PmWiki, and ConnectedText (now discontinued). Other, more
general, wiki applications have components geared for individual users,

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 including MoinMoin (which offers a "DesktopEdition"[14]), and TiddlyWiki.

Editing
Most wiki software uses a special syntax, known as wiki markup, for users
to format the text, instead of requiring them to enter in HTML. Some wiki
applications also include a WYSIWYG editor, either instead of or in addition
to the wiki markup editing.

Based on the atomic property of database systems, any edit should be

traced. On wiki software, the chronology of edits (e.g. published by
Internet users) in any given article may be locally saved with a common
.xml file extension by people having administrator rights.

Hosted application
There are a variety of wiki hosting services, otherwise known as wiki
farms, that host users' wikis on a server. Some wiki software is only
available in hosted form: PBworks, Wetpaint and Wikispaces are all
examples of wiki hosting services that run on code that is only available on
those sites. Other wiki software is available in both hosted and
downloadable form, including Confluence, Socialtext, MediaWiki and
XWiki.

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 Additional features

Content-management
features
Wiki software can include features that come with traditional content
management systems, such as calendars, to-do lists, blogs and discussion
forums. All of these can either be stored via versioned wiki pages, or
simply be a separate piece of functionality. Software that supports blogs
with wiki-style editing and versioning is sometimes known as "bliki"
software.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is an example of wiki software that is designed to

support such features at its core. Many of the enterprise wiki applications,
such as TWiki, Confluence and SharePoint, also support such features, as
do open-source applications like MediaWiki and XWiki, via plugins.[15]

Scripting
Some wiki applications let users embed scripting-style calls into wiki
pages, which are processed by the wiki's parser and run either when the

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 page is saved or when it is displayed. XWiki and MediaWiki are examples
of such applications.[16]

Specifically XWiki offers support for the following scripting languages:

Groovy, Velocity, Ruby, Python, PHP or more generally any JSR223
scripting language.

Semantic annotation
Wiki software can let users store data via the wiki, in a way that can be
exported via the Semantic Web, or queried internally within the wiki. A wiki
that allows such annotation is known as a semantic wiki. The current best-
known semantic wiki software is Semantic MediaWiki, a plugin to
MediaWiki.

Mobile access
Some wiki software have special handling for accessing by mobile devices,
such as mobile phones. This is usually done by displaying conservative
HTML coding.[17][18]

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 Offline viewing and editing
Various approaches to providing wiki functionality when the user is not
online have been tried. For users who need to simply read the wiki's
content when offline, a copy of the content can often be made easily; in
the case of Wikipedia, CD-ROMs and printed versions have been made of
parts of Wikipedia's content.

Allowing offline editing, however (where the changes are synchronized

when the user is back online), is a much more difficult process. One
approach to doing this is using a distributed revision control system as a
backend of the wiki, in peer-to-peer style. With this approach, there is no
central store of the wiki's content; instead, every user keeps a complete
copy of the wiki locally, and the software handles merging and propagating
of changes when they are made. This is the approach taken by the ikiwiki
engine (which can use the distributed revision control system Git as its
back-end), and Code Co-op (a distributed revision control system that
includes a wiki component).

Distributing and
decentralizing
Wiki software can be distributed.[19] XWiki is able to function in this way.
[20]
Smallest Federated Wiki promotes a federation of wiki servers,[21]

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 There has also been research done on allowing Wikipedia to be run as a
decentralized wiki.[22][23]

See also

Collaborative editing
Comparison of wiki software
Enterprise portal
Enterprise social software
List of collaborative software
List of wiki software

Notes

1. The Wiki Way. Quick

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 1. The Wiki Way. Quick
collaboration on the Web,
Addison-Wesley (April
2001) ISBN 0-201-71499-
X
2. "JAM wiki - Just
Advertising and Marketing"
(http://fr.jamwiki.org/) .
JAM wiki. Retrieved
2021-05-12.
3. "Engines" (http://www.wikic
reole.org/wiki/Engines) .
WikiCreole. 14 June 2010.
Retrieved 2022-05-18.

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 Retrieved 2022-05-18.
4. "Alexa Top 500 Global
Sites" (https://web.archive.
org/web/2015030217392
0/http://www.alexa.com/to
psites) . Alexa. Archived
from the original (http://ww
w.alexa.com/topsites) on 2
March 2015. Retrieved
11 April 2017.
5. "Browse data: All" (https://
web.archive.org/web/2021
0725180037/https://wikiin
dex.org/Special:BrowseDat

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 dex.org/Special:BrowseDat
a/All?_single&Status%5B
0%5D=Active&Status%5B
1%5D=New&Status%5B
2%5D=Vibrant) .
WikiIndex. Archived from
the original (http://wikiinde
x.org/Special:BrowseData/
All?_single&Status%5B0%
5D=Active&Status%5B1%5
D=New&Status%5B2%5D
=Vibrant) on Jul 25, 2021.
6. "Year of the enterprise
Wiki: Lightweight Web

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 collaboration gets down to
business (http://www.infow
orld.com/d/developer-worl
d/year-enterprise-wiki-30
5) ", Jon Udell, InfoWorld,
December 30, 2004.
7. "[CONFCLOUD-67129]
Link to an undefined page
(A page that doesn't exist
yet)" (https://web.archive.o
rg/web/20221130210831/
https://jira.atlassian.com/br
owse/CONFCLOUD-6712

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software 22/12/24, 15 51
Page 21 of 34
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 9) . Jira Software -
Atlassian. Archived from
the original (https://jira.atla
ssian.com/browse/CONFC
LOUD-67129) on Nov 30,
2022.
8. "Fulltextsearch for Wiki" (ht
tps://web.archive.org/web/
20201112012012/https://
microsoftteams.uservoice.c
om/forums/555103-public/
suggestions/18623599-full
textsearch-for-wiki) .
Microsoft Teams

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 Microsoft Teams
UserVoice. Archived from
the original (https://micros
oftteams.uservoice.com/for
ums/555103-public/sugge
stions/33575167-wiki-sear
ch) on 2020-11-12.
9. "Foswiki - The free
enterprise collaboration
platform (http://foswiki.or
g/) ".
10. "TWiki - the Open Source
Enterprise Wiki and Web
Application Platform (htt

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 Application Platform (htt
p://twiki.org/) ".
11. "BlueSpice - The Wiki and
Knowledge Base Software (
https://bluespice.com/) ".
12. "Enterprise" (http://tiki.org/
Enterprise) . Tiki Wiki CMS
Groupware. 11 August
2022. Retrieved 11 April
2017.
13. "Enterprise hub" (https://w
ww.mediawiki.org/wiki/Ente
rprise_hub) . MediaWiki.

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 Retrieved 11 April 2017.
14. "DesktopEdition" (http://mo
inmo.in/DesktopEdition) .
MoinMoin. 2016-12-01.
Retrieved 11 April 2017.
15. "Applications & Extensions
(Features.Applications)" (ht
tps://web.archive.org/web/
20170510025733/http://pl
atform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/v
iew/Features/Applications)
. XWiki. September 23,
2015. Archived from the

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 original (http://platform.xwi
ki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Featur
es/Applications) on May
10, 2017. Retrieved 11 April
2017.
16. Anslow, C.; Riehle, D.
(2007), Lightweight End-
User Programming with
Wikis, SAP Research,
CiteSeerX 10.1.1.131.2458 (
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.ed
u/viewdoc/summary?doi=1
0.1.1.131.2458)

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 17. Socialtext Optimizes Wiki
for Mobile Users (http://ww
w.cio.com/article/19955/So
cialtext_Optimizes_Wiki_for
_Mobile_Users?contentId=1
9955&slug=&) , CIO
Magazine, April 5, 2006,
retrieved 2008-09-20
18. Lu, Mat (July 15, 2007).
"W2: a little iPhone wiki]" (
https://archive.today/2013
0205030858/http://www.t
uaw.com/2007/07/15/w2-a
-little-iphone-wiki/) .

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software 22/12/24, 15 51
Page 27 of 34
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 -little-iphone-wiki/) .
TUAW. Archived from the
original on 2013-02-05.
Retrieved August 24, 2021.
19. Davoust, Alan; Skaf-Molli,
Hala; Molli, Pascal;
Esfandiari, Babak; Aslan,
Khaled (2015). "Distributed
wikis: a survey" (https://hal.
inria.fr/hal-01100371/docu
ment) . Concurrency and
Computation: Practice and
Experience. 27 (11): 2751–
2777.

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 2777.
doi:10.1002/cpe.3439 (htt
ps://doi.org/10.1002%2Fcp
e.3439) . ISSN 1532-0626
(https://search.worldcat.or
g/issn/1532-0626) .
S2CID 45142475 (https://a
pi.semanticscholar.org/Cor
pusID:45142475) .
20. "XWiki Concerto Project
homepage" (http://concert
o.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/
Main/WebHome) .
Retrieved 11 April 2017.

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 Retrieved 11 April 2017.
21. "Welcome Visitors" (http://f
ed.wiki.org) . Retrieved
11 April 2017.
22. A Decentralized Wiki
Engine for Collaborative
Wikipedia Hosting (http://w
ww.globule.org/publi/DWE
CWH_webist2007.html) ,
Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume
Pierre and Maarten van
Steen, Proceedings of the
3rd International
Conference on Web

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 Conference on Web
Information Systems and
Technology (Webist),
March 2007
23. Wikipedia Workload
Analysis for Decentralized
Hosting (http://www.globul
e.org/publi/WWADH_comn
et2009.html) , Guido
Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre,
Maarten van Steen,
Elsevier Computer
Networks 53(11), pp.
1830–1845, July 2009

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 1830–1845, July 2009

References

Andersen, Espen (2005).

Using Wikis in a Corporate
Context (http://www.espen.co
m/papers/Andersen-2005-cor
pwikis.pdf) . In Handbuch E-
Learning. A. Hohenstein and K.
Wilbers (eds). Cologne,
WoltersKluwer. 5.8: 15.
Guy, Marieke (2006). Wiki or
Won't He? A Tale of Public

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 Sector Wikis (http://www.ariad
ne.ac.uk/issue49/guy/) .
Ariadne Issue 49.
Grzeganek, K.; Frost, I.; Gross,
D (2011). Spoilt for Choice -
Wiki Software for Knowledge
Management in Organisations
(http://www.community-of-kn
owledge.de/fileadmin/user_upl
oad/attachments/wikis_for_kn
owledge_management_in_org
anisations.pdf) . Community of
Knowledge.

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 Retrieved from
"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Wiki_software&oldid=126379195
9"

This page was last edited on 18

December 2024, at 17:28 (UTC). •
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