Rf Cfor Wiki

Has anybody thought about writing a RequestForComments for a Wiki engine?

It would be a great to standardise the formatting rules for a Wiki ... and the associated functionality of a Wiki ... -- GerritRiessen

What would we standardize? Many of the differences between wiki formatting rules are there to support novel features. Maybe a better idea would be a DTD/Schema for wiki discovery and use, so we could build wiki directories and indexes. Such a dtd could include links to other indexing documents or to a self-describing wiki (extracting it's own description from metadata). --

But some formatting rules are the same, those which are the same could be standardised and define a kind of base level Wiki. Possible extensions could also be standarised (e.g. the 'wiki:' rule could be extended to become url:KeyWord?), and/or other extensions could be suggested as part of the RFC.

The point would be have a single defining Wiki standard and to encourage future Wikis to use the same formatting rules. A RfC would also be a good place to discuss how Wiki works, i.e. why RfCforWiki is linked but not RfCForWiki. It would also be a good place to describe the InterWiki protocol for interchanging documents, and it would also present Wiki to an audience that might not normally have come into contact with Wiki.

However, there is already a description about Wiki (TheWikiWay) but an RfC could concentrate more on the technical detail and less on the background information or reasons for specific design decisions. -- GerritRiessen

Don't forget the publicity value of an RFC. The Slashdot crowd is largely aware of Wiki, but the IEEE crowd isn't necessarily. The IEEE people are (IMUHO) the more likely to appreciate and invent novel new things, so getting their attention is good. If somebody wants to draft an RFC on, perhaps, RfcForWikiDraft?, I would definitely help edit it into submittable form. -- DanielKnapp

I'm for writing a draft and seeing how many people get involved and whether anything sensible comes out of it :-) I guess the headings would be similar to those of standard RFC: abstract, intro, history, terminology, description, examples, authors, references? -- GerritRiessen