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Wiki software (also known as awiki engine or awiki application) iscollaborative software that runs awiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via aweb browser. A wiki system is usually aweb application that runs on one or moreweb servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either afile system or adatabase. Wikis are a type ofweb content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software thatweb hosting facilities offer.
There are dozens of actively maintainedwiki engines. They vary in theplatforms they run on, theprogramming language they were developed in, whether they areopen-source orproprietary, their support for natural language characters and conventions, and their assumptions about technical versus social control ofediting.
The first generally recognized "wiki" application,WikiWikiWeb, was created by American computer programmerWard 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.
Wiki software originated from olderversion control systems used for documentation and software in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s these generally hadweb browser interfaces. However, they lacked the ability to easily create links between internal pages without writingHTML code. For WikiWikiWeb, theCamelCase naming convention was used to indicate internal links (internalhyperlinks to other pages), without requiring HTML code.
By the timeMediaWiki appeared, this convention had been largely abandoned in favor of explicitly marking links in editedsource 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 morewiki applications were written, in a variety ofprogramming 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.
Somecontent management systems, such asMicrosoft SharePoint, have also adopted wiki-like functionality.
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 largeknowledge 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:
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 existingknowledge bases to it and no major engines use it as their native markup syntax.
There are essentially three types of usage for wiki software: public-facing wikis with a potentially large community of readers and editors, privateenterprise wikis fordata management by corporations and other organizations, andpersonal wikis, meant to be used by a single person to manage notes, and usually run on adesktop. Some types of wiki software are specifically designed for one of the usage types, while other types can be used for all three, but contain functionality, either in their core or through plugins, that help with one or more of the usage types.
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 powersWikipedia, 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 includeMoinMoin andPmWiki,along with many others.[5]
Other Internet websites, based on wiki software, includeencyclopedias such asSensei's Library,Parlia, andWikiTree.
Enterprise wiki software is software intended to be used in a corporate (or organizational) context,[6] especially to enhance internalknowledge sharing. It tends to have a greater emphasis on features like access control, integration with other software, anddocument management. Most proprietary wiki applications specifically market themselves as enterprise solutions, includingSocialtext,Jive,Traction TeamPage andNotion.
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 inConfluence (since 2018),[7]Full Text Search as inMicrosoft Teams,[8] or Version Control.
In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions, includingXWiki,Foswiki,[9]TWiki,[10] andBlueSpice.[11] Some open-source wiki applications, though they do not specifically bill themselves as enterprise solutions, have marketing materials geared for enterprise users, likeTiki Wiki CMS Groupware[12] andMediaWiki.[13] Many other wiki applications have also been used within enterprises.
Among the many companies and government organizations that use wikis internally areAdobe Systems,Amazon.com,Intel,Microsoft, and theUnited 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 fordocument management,project management,customer relationship management,enterprise resource planning, and many other kinds of data management.
Features of wikis which can serve an enterprise include:
Software that is specifically designed for running personal wikis includesPmWiki,Tomboy, andConnectedText (now discontinued). Other, more general, wiki applications have components geared for individual users, includingMoinMoin (which offers a "DesktopEdition"[14]), andTiddlyWiki.
Most wiki software uses a special syntax, known aswiki markup, for users to format the text, instead of requiring them to enter inHTML. Some wiki applications also include aWYSIWYG editor, either instead of or in addition to the wiki markup editing.
Based on theatomic property ofdatabase systems, any edit should betraced. On wiki software, thechronology of edits (e.g. published by Internet users) in any given article may belocally saved with a common.xml file extension by people havingadministrator rights.
There are a variety ofwiki 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 andWikispaces are all examples of wiki hosting services that run on code that is only available on those sites. Other wiki software is available in bothhosted and downloadable form, includingConfluence,Socialtext,MediaWiki andXWiki.
Wiki software can include features that come with traditional content management systems, such ascalendars,to-do lists,blogs and discussionforums. 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 asTWiki,Confluence andSharePoint, also support such features, as do open-source applications likeMediaWiki andXWiki, viaplugins.[15]
Some wiki applications let users embedscripting-style calls into wiki pages, which are processed by the wiki's parser and run either when the page is saved or when it is displayed.XWiki andMediaWiki are examples of such applications.[16]
Specifically XWiki offers support for the following scripting languages:Groovy,Velocity,Ruby,Python,PHP or more generally anyJSR223 scripting language.
Wiki software can let users store data via the wiki, in a way that can be exported via theSemantic Web, or queried internally within the wiki. A wiki that allows such annotation is known as asemantic wiki. The current best-known semantic wiki software isSemantic MediaWiki, a plugin to MediaWiki.
Some wiki software have special handling for accessing by mobile devices, such asmobile phones. This is usually done by displaying conservativeHTML coding.[17][18]
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 adistributed revision control system as abackend of the wiki, inpeer-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 theikiwiki engine (which can use the distributed revision control systemGit as its back-end), andCode Co-op (a distributed revision control system that includes a wiki component).
Wiki software can bedistributed.[19] Examples include XWiki,[20] Smallest Federated Wiki[21] and Ibis.[22] There has also been research done on allowing Wikipedia to be run as adecentralized wiki.[23][24]
