Inter Wiki

InterWiki is the idea of linking wikis together.

Historically, the term referred to having one wiki, distributed across several servers; See:DistributedWiki, OneBigWiki (SwitchWiki), WikiWebTransferProtocol, WorldWideWikiWeb, MultiServerWiki

Over time, InterWiki has come to mean connecting existing wiki, of various WikiEngine types, together.

The idea has expanded even beyond wiki: Connecting all willing communication systems together into a gigantic mesh of software. See IntComm wiki, WebServices, WebServicesDiscussion.

InterWiki organizing happens all over the web. Many wiki and mailing lists contribute substantially to InterWiki efforts. Wiki include MeatballWiki (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki), CommunityWiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community?RecentChanges), and the InterWikiWiki (http://www.communitywiki.org/cw/InterWiki/).

Not all InterWiki work is technology work; Some of it is purely social (introducing sympathetic wiki communities to each other) - like the TourBusStop project, some of it is standards based (WikiNodes; http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=wikinodes+lionkimbro&d=74051118843292&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=e5345dbf,335521d ), some of it is legal. (http://wikilegal.wiki.taoriver.net/)

Alas, two wiki – “Wiki Futures” and “Wiki Legal” – are offline as of 2008-03-11. In a couple of months, if they are still offline, please delete those delegations.

Work on InterWiki technologies and conventions has been in effect for a long time now. SisterSites and InterWikiLinks have been around for a long time.

New linking technologies such as the

NearLink
- (http://wikifeatures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/NearLink) and
UnifiedRecentChanges
- (http://wikifeatures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/UnifiedRecentChanges) were introduced in at least 2003

Many more technologies on the way.

Page transfer standards, independent of wiki syntax, is underway. And a lot of work on a
- WikiSyntaxStandard has been underway for a long time now.

It is clear that InterWiki technology has been delivered, and is continuing to be developed, and will expand in the future.

The future appears to be less Inter-Wiki and more Inter-Net.

What has been called wiki appears to be becoming the document arm of PublicInternet Communication, meshing with threading friendly systems, blogs, identity services, resource sharing, and existing online communities.

See InterWikiDiscussion

CategoryWiki CategoryInterWiki