Turn Your Back and, Wiki-Wiki, Wikis!

Back in the day when I ate, slept, drank and lived Web technology, Ward Cunningham sent me an early copy of his seminal work that marked the invention of the Wiki. The year was 2001. The book was "The Wiki Way" on which Ward and Bo Leuf collaborated.

Ward and I exchanged quite a few emails on the subject. I played around with the Wiki he had on the Net. We enthused over the potential. Then we moved on. Ward's personal Web site is sparse and terse, indicating he's not taking on new clients but is focusing his life on other things. Funny. So am I.

All of that is by way of background for my observation this morning that, man, there are a lot of Wikis out there! I don't just mean Wiki sites (though there are a ton of those, too, as you can glimpse here). I mean Wiki tools. Which are really applications for creating Wikis. There's even a site devoted to comparing them. By the way, it's one of the best technology comparison sites I've ever seen.

While MediaWiki is the most popular and arguably one of the most robust (it's the basic building block of WikiPedia), I found two others that seemed awfully exciting.

Twiki has to be one of the most extensible Wikis I've seen. You can build entire applications on this robust base. It's positioned as an enterprise product and it sure seems plenty powerful for that market. My only problem with it was the relatively dense and sometimes obtuse syntax, which I'm sure is an offshoot of the desire to create a truly extensible Wiki world.

I've decided to adopt DokuWiki for a collaborative documentation project because its syntax is classically simple Wiki markup with few frills and because it does some things (like automatic TOC generation for pages with three or more headings) aimed at documentation uses that other Wikis don't offer.

But the bottom line is this: Wikis are really powerful and useful technologies and they come in a staggering array of varieties for a broad range of uses. I wonder how Ward is feeling about his "baby" these days. I think I'll shoot off an email and see if he still remembers me six years later.

(BTW, the headline is a bit confusing unless you know that wiki-wiki is a Hawaiian term for "quick" and is the source of Ward's inspiration for naming these clever little beasts.)