Shortest Wiki Contest

Ward's Wiki code (WikiBase) is amazingly elegant and short. But it was just a bit of Perl-4. What's the shortest piece of source you can write that will implement a fully-featured wiki? Use any language you like. See WikiPrinciples for a list of the (minimum) requirements for a wiki.

The contenders under 50 lines (WikiPrinciples obeyed):

SigWik, 4 lines, 222 chars of Perl and Shell. (source: http://caseywest.com/code/scripts/sigwik.txt) (based on FleaWi)
FleaWi, 4 lines, 228 chars of Perl and Shell. (source: http://nick.cleaton.net/fleawi.txt) (based on SigWik)
WiPhiki, 4 lines, 289 chars of PHP and Shell. (source: WiPhiki)
NanoWiki, 5 lines, 295 chars of Perl. (source: NanoWiki) (partially based on SigWik and PeeWee)
PeeWee, 7 lines, 444 chars of Perl. (source: http://caseywest.com/code/scripts/peewee.txt)
PeWi, 7 lines, 515 chars of Perl. (source: http://infomesh.net/200X/pewi/pewi.pl.txt)
Peki, 7 lines of Perl. (http://phiki.infogami.com/peki)
Tinki, 8 lines, 729 chars of Ruby. (source: http://gist.github.com/3808680)
WyPy, 11 lines, 814 chars of Python. (source: http://infomesh.net/2003/wypy/wy.py.txt)
MuWiki, 15 lines of PHP. (source: http://jaramir.slack.it/MuWiki/wiki.phps. Valid xHTML)
WjKj, 16 lines, 1,212 chars of Java (JSP) (source: WjKj)
WikWiki, 17 lines, 1,287 chars of PHP (source: WikWiki)
Phiki, 18 lines of PHP. (source: http://phiki.infogami.com)
WyRiki, 20 lines, 1,361 chars of Ruby (source: http://onestepback.org/misc/wyriki.txt, technique shamelessly stolen from WyPy)
Pyki, 25 lines of Python (source: http://phiki.infogami.com/pykisource) Based on Phiki
TinyWiki, 28 lines of Perl. (even though it has grown to ~97 lines now, the classic 28-line version met the WikiPrinciples)
Qiki, 32 lines of Python. (http://www.colourcountry.net/cgi-bin/qiki.py) (now downloadable!)
FinikiWiki, 38 lines of Perl.
RikiWiki, 40 lines of Ruby.

The contenders under 50 lines (WikiPrinciples not obeyed):

WikKe, 3 lines, 206 (IE: 199) chars of PHP, JavaScript, and Bash. (source: http://jane.no-ip.com/~sbp/wikke.txt)

The contenders under 2 lines (dubious):

BogoWiki, one char of Shell to load a wiki process.
Kwiki, one line, 39 chars of Perl to load a wiki module family: "use Kwiki;Kwiki->new->load_hub->process" (http://www.kwiki.org/) I don't think that counts. See comment about WikiPlusPlus? below...

Of course, the shortest source implementing a fully-featured Wiki is written in the WikiPlusPlus? language (implementation of which is left as an exercise to the reader). It looks something like this:

wiki^standard: run

I got a "Cross-Search Time-out Error on Line 1". Can you help me fix it? :-)

Does storing the HTML as templates in separate files, rather than in the source code count as SLOC? Could be a loophole there.

Since mixing HTML and code is generally discouraged, I would have to say templates are fair. Templates will also be small and not interesting to optimize anyway.

Tough talk

My money's on WardCunningham. Language: Perl. -- TimVoght

Thanks for your confidence Tim. My wiki/4 was 220 lines of perl in its first working version, though it has grown since. I got rid of dispatching by writing it as cooperating cgi scripts: wiki.cgi, edit.cgi, post.cgi, search.cgi and changes.cgi. I bet it could be done in 100 lines. -- WardCunningham

Perl is definitely the language. I'm not sure Ward is twisted enough to win. -- CliffordAdams

That's mighty big talk round these here parts, Clifford. Me, I'd back python/zope to beat out perl in shortness on account of there seems like a lot in zope to leverage. But I also wonder whether some Interdev magic might put the freeware to shame... -- PeterMerel

I'd bet that the proprietary KayLanguage from http://www.kx.com will surpass any 0known experience with concise programming. When programming in K, one refers to characters of code, not lines. And there are usually no loops. -- EricNewhuis that sounds a lot like APL, which was much more widespread. The KayLanguage is a descendant of APL, among others, so that isn't surprising. APL is very concise but not 'optimized' for web/text processing, so I doubt it would be *the* shortest.

Come on! You Python people can't let these two go unchallenged!

Can't? Why not? "What is the shortest time a third party reader needs to understand another person's WikiSource?" That would be a more useful measurement.

I concur. I looked at a short perl wiki, and it left me aghast. Then I looked at wypy with all the lambda and RE, and was again floored. When I look at my VERBOSE procedural programming, it reads like Dick and Jane at the compsci lab. Which means any reasonably literate wannabe geek can comprehend it. I propose a competition for the EASIEST TO COMPREHEND WIKI. -- KirkBailey

The 23 line Python contender WyPy currently (2003-08) wipes the floor with all the other submissions, but I wouldn't call it exactly readable, unfortunately. Still, ObfuscatedPython is possible then...

I thought Dinki was rather easy to understand, and it's in Perl. Unfortunately, the source appears to have gone missing.

I see WyRiki was just added - at 20 lines of Ruby. But I'm sure that a bunch of useless new lines could be removed, to make it "shorter."

How long is a "line?" 80 characters

Next up: The ObfuscatedWikiContest?. ;->

I'm sure that something like "#!/bin/sh\nGET http://wiki.tld/ | perl" would make for a much shorter wiki, but that'd be cheating now, wouldn't it? Perhaps it's as best to limit this competition to some major languages (Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP seem the best contenders)? I hope that everyone enjoys the new WyPy: WyRiki's introduction was quite a challenge! -- SeanPalmer

Anybody up for the challenge of SmallestXhtmlWikiContest??

Why? The difference in HTML used by a wiki versus the XHTML equivalent is quite trivial; you could just convert any of the existing entries to XHTML, in about 5 minutes, and be done with.

It appears to me that it would be quite different as simple regular expressions no longer work. When you see \n\n, a simple implementation will put in , an xhtml wiki has to analyze all the appropriate closing tags before continuing. I'm also curious about how implementations deal with such things as between  and . I'd also expect as much semantic correctness as possible. For example consecutive list items should be contained within <ul></ul>.

Well since XhtmlIsDead, I see this as rather pointless.

How about a MostReadableShortestWiki?, what good is code that can't be read in any decent timeframe?

Define readable, and write a computer program to measure it for a given piece of code.

It would seem that the challenge has come to the point of counting in characters instead of lines.

In which case, common standards are needed - "cols=9" is somewhat extreme!

I've learned that Perl is better than PHP for short programming, yet! :o) -- Jaramir (see: MuWiki)

In general, yes. But see my implementation (WiPhiki - PHP + Bash) which is shorter than 5 other Perl implementations. -- Smasty

CategoryWikiImplementation