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WIKI Software - Key Features


Pete

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Hi folks

 

WIKI's are confusing to me. They're usually listed as their own software package, however all they appear to be (to me at least) is a content management system with the following features:

  • Page history
  • Easy linking to other pages (links also don't break when pages are renamed??)
  • Page comments with threading (indentation)
  • Contributions from all levels of user (if desired)
  • An editor - WYSIWIG and/or [[tag]] based
  • Spam filter of some form
  • ...?

I'm interested in learning what other features make a WIKI software different to a normal content management system. It occurs to me that there might be a gap in the market for something more user/admin-friendly and easier to upgrade.

 

I'm not suggesting I could develop something overnight or that I should in fact attempt something like this, but unless I'm missing something all WIKI software seems to follow the same general pattern.

 

From a data point of view, the bit where they tend to run into trouble is that all pages seem to be under the root with no categorisation, which leads to things like duplicate page name issues, plus a burden on the server (it's easier on resources to search for a page with "xcom" in the title under a specific category (it filters by category first in that DB query) than search EVERY page for the word "xcom" for example).

 

Also, the caching options in MediaWiki at least aren't as good as they should be - an option in the CMS used to run StrategyCore caches every page to a static HTML file which is served instead of touching PHP or mySQL, thus loading pages in a fraction of the normal time and using far less resources (it's not switched on here because I've simply not had the time to alter the necessary code to switch it on yet.

 

I didn't intend to start of sounding like I was moaning about WIKI software, but I guess I am :)

 

If anyone involved in a WIKI would like to fill in some feature gaps from my list above that would be much appreciated.

 

Features I personally would add are:

  • Tagging - by this I mean tagging things against games, elements (building, research etc) and so on - anything you think someone might want to search for that could almost build it's own contents page from the tags (also so you don't have to have things like (EU2012) after a page title).
  • Categorisation - I sort of covered this with tagging above really. I think the above allows for greater flexibility and is its own form of categorisation rather than forcing pages into subpages which doesn't really work for WIKI's.

I thought I had more, but that's it for now.

 

To recap, because I do go on a bit, I would like to know:

  1. What features I missed from the first list
  2. What features you would like to see in WIKI software

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