TechWiki

[Copy/paste from: http://mbyron.philosophy.kent.edu/pubs/tiki.html] "A wiki is a collaborative website, based on the original WikiWikiWeb at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki and deployed brilliantly in the WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org). It provides a simple, form-based way to create and edit web pages right over the web, requiring no knowledge of HTML or any significant markup language. Users visit a page, click "edit", type the text they want into the web form, and click “save.� Their content is saved as a new or modified webpage. No muss, no fuss, no HTML. The wiki is great for collaborative class projects, as it allows students to meet virtually at their convenience and work on documents together".

[Copy/paste from: http://msed.byu.edu/ipt/west/a_WikiOutlines.html] "A wiki is "a collaborative Web site comprised of the perpetual collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Web site using a browser interface, including the work of previous authors. In contrast, a blog, typically authored by an individual, does not allow visitors to change the original posted material, only add comments to the original content. The term wiki refers to either the Web site or the software used to create the site." Webopedia Definition"

[Copy/paste from: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml ] "In The Wiki Way (2001), the one and only book devoted solely to wiki, Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham define wiki as "a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web 'pages,' a hypertext system for storing and modifying information — a database, where each page is easily editable by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client" (page 14). Wiki pages are controlled — created, linked, edited, deleted, moved, renamed, and so on — by a programming or scripting language, and stored either as plain ASCII text files or in an external relational database, such as MySQL, Oracle, or PostgreSQL. Wiki pages are only rendered or displayed as HTML through templates by the wiki Web server. Ward's original wiki was written in Perl, and he released the script as copyright-limited open source."

[Copy/paste from: http://mbyron.philosophy.kent.edu/pubs/tiki.html ] Tiki has the advantage of combining a range of web services in one convenient and easily installed application."

[Copy/Paste from: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml ]

Wiki Search and Page Control Tools

"All wiki implementations contain a few basic search and navigational capabilities, some of which relate to their nature as hypertext databases. The integrated search feature of a wiki at its most primitive is a keyword or text-match tool. Ward's WikiWikiWeb site shows an extension of this feature to include page titles or full text, with the latter searching a separate index updated daily. Some wiki search engines provide case-sensitive and phrase searching, along with Boolean expressions. Every time a page is added or changed, you can select the RecentChanges or Changes query, which displays a real-time update of those page titles http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RecentChanges. The History query on some wiki clones provides a list of page versions back to the very first instance http://prosaic.swiki.net/1.history. Wikis that implement page-version control may also allow page rollback, usually via the History view; sometimes you will see the word "diffs" used for version display, which means differences, a short form of the software utility of the same name.

The Backlinks function may or may not be enabled, depending on what wiki software you use http://zwiki.org/BackLinks/backlinks. Backlinks shows you a hyperlinked list of which pages refer to the page you are viewing. The Category feature on Ward's WikiWikiWeb is explained as a "ReverseIndex to related wiki pages" http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory. Some wiki clones have since adopted this wiki structural and search tool. An interlinked site map, the TourBusMap http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?TourBusMap, operates in some wikis. The "grand central" wiki TourBusStop is you-know-where-by now hyperhint:. The WikiWikiWeb also features a nice LikePage search that produces a list of page titles matching the one you're on. Each time you select a new page title, a new LikePage list is generated. Slick and quick, it works something like the Related Links in the Alexa Toolbar or "Similar pages" in a Google results list. Ward's WikiWikiWeb also contains a VisualTour http://c2.com/cgi/tour link that you'll find on every page. Finally, some wikis show you a hyperlinked, hierarchical trail ("breadcrumbs") back to where you started, or back to the FrontPage. For examples of these, see my Searchers' ZWiki http://searcher.freezope.org/zwiki/FrontPage, the ZWiki.org site, or any of the public wikis hosted at SeedWiki.comhttp://www.seedwiki.com. Experiments linking wikis togetherfor searching purposes generally fall under the InterWiki concept (or other names) intended to mimic Usenet servers [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?InterWiki]. In the WikkiTikkiTavi InterWiki implementation, each public or private Tavi wiki controls its own InterWiki linking through a dynamically updated database [http://tavi.sourceforge.net/InterWiki]; you can jump to other wikis or conduct searches of non-wiki Web resources. Canadian Sunhir Shah's MetaWiki inter-wiki keyword search tool [http://sunir.org/apps/meta.pl], based on cached page titles, is found on the Meatball Wiki, which he edits. Jeff Dairiki's experimental,real-time InterWiki Title Search [http://www.dairiki.org/interwiki/search.php] is another example of how wiki developers are enhancing the utility of the technology. You'll find an article summarizing InterWiki in the Wikipedia [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterWiki], one of the largest single wikis around. Other ideas and leads about wiki data mining appear on the WikiWikiWeb at WikiMines[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiMines] and via the Meatball Wiki InterWiki page [http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterWiki]."