Wiki software

The first generally recognized "wiki" application, WikiWikiWeb, was created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham, and launched on c2.com in 1995.

However, they lacked the ability to easily create links between internal pages without writing 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.

This proved to be the critical change that allowed ordinary authors of English to write wiki pages, and non-technical users to read them.

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.

[5] Other Internet websites, based on wiki software, include encyclopedias such as Sensei's Library, Parlia, and WikiTree.

Most proprietary wiki applications specifically market themselves as enterprise solutions, including Socialtext, Jive, Traction TeamPage and Notion.

[8] In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions, including XWiki, Foswiki,[9] TWiki,[10] and BlueSpice.

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

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.

Other, more general, wiki applications have components geared for individual users, including MoinMoin (which offers a "DesktopEdition"[14]), and TiddlyWiki.

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.

Other wiki software is available in both hosted and downloadable form, including Confluence, Socialtext, MediaWiki and XWiki.

Wiki software can include features that come with traditional content management systems, such as calendars, to-do lists, blogs and discussion forums.

Allowing offline editing, however (where the changes are synchronized when the user is back online), is a much more difficult process.