Title: Ideal wiki software
Issue: Future wiki design and features
What happened:

Session Notes from WikiSym Open Space Session: "The Ideal Wiki"
July 8, 2010 - 11:00 AM

Attendees: Erik Moeller, Roan Kattouw, Howie Fung, Victor Grishchenko, Priyanka Dhanda, Eugene Eric Kim, Dirk Riehle, Daniel Kinzler, Anna Bauer, Robert Biuk Aghai

Structure:

• Open brainstorm of characteristics (features, adjectives) of an ideal wiki system
• Identify quick high-impact wins
• Identify best-of-breed implementations out there

Brainstorm results

Architecture
Granular addressability of all content
Needs to make intelligent assumptions when content changes
Branching and merging
Detailed/terse view of pages
Forking
Offline editing
Permission system
Cross-wiki interoperability (watchlists, search, imports, etc.)
Entire wiki can be viewed at a given timestamp (Wayback Machine style)
Powerful scripting language
Version changes to site schema
Support batch operations - reduce bot hackery

Core UI
Great mobile support
Better in-page/cross-page operations (copy and paste 2.0)
Gesture support
Supports common workflows established through wiki norms and practices

Links
Automatic link suggestions (still permitting intentional linking)

Reading
Integrate machine translation
Better language recommendations

Communication and social features
Chat and other real-time communications
Presence (who's online)
Person-centric user experience (adapt to user's actions in the system)
Expert finder (who can help me with this / can you help with this)
Proper discussion system
Integrated more deeply into pages (e.g. side-by-side view of page / related comments)
Linked to actions (e.g. confirm that action was taken, reject suggested action)
Thank you features / surface "favorites"
Broadcasting features for community organizing

Editing
Ideally, no wiki mark-up required
To the extent that it is used, it should be parseable
Pluggable architecture e.g. for link pattern detection
Support for voice regonition
Real-time collaborative editing
In-place editing of media files (images, video, sound ..)
More granular editing of everything else
Equations support

Change tracking
Personalized recent changes view
Vastly improved watch list / alert system
Vastly improved abuse filtering system
Collaborative edit patrolling

Structured data management
Read/Edit/Display/Search structured data more intelligently
Spreadsheet-type editing
Form-type editing
Better access to page metadata
Proper knowledge modeling (constraints, inferences, etc.)

Visualization / stats
Page history (slider)
Heat maps (activity)
Blame maps (origin)
Data sets (tables, timelines, maps, etc.)
Wiki health dashboard (core stats / activity)

Voting/rating features
Page/object quality
Decision-making

Fun
FarmWiki - FarmVille integration (Eugene Eric Kim is very keen on this)
Self-authoring features


Adjectives
Awesome, friendly and unnatural, user centered, proactive, searchable, social, flexible and robust, easy, fast, slick, adaptive, interactive, familiar, open and free, beautiful, interoperable, fun, mobile, engaging, ubiquitous, multilingual, privacy aware, enterprise compliant, secure, i18n, browseable, visualisable, researchable, accesible, extensible, API-able, operable, x-able


Quick wins
Expand wiki-matrix
Wordpress-style extension system
Medium-to-large wins
Formal grammar for wikitext
Re-base wiki on a distributed version control system
Additional discussion notes at https://photos-1.dropbox.com/i/xl/tQj2C89g1f8pixElS8DlkZrwXQLGWHZlOzYZ_vETiUk/938230/1279227600/7f29ac0

Alternative report

Brainstorming. Many items were outlined on the board by Martin Cleaver. Photos were taken of these outlines. Here is a compressed summary by one participant.

• touch based ; virtual reality ; gestures ; mobile-enabled
• social networking ; chat facilities ; real time collab editing ; communications that look like communications
• expert-finding, maybe derived mechanically
  • simul view of the communication and the page in common
  • granular communication ; microblogging on this <==> knowledge management
• natural language ; speech ;
• graphical objects ; image editing
• kinzler: data & tables ; graphs ; i ask for derived statistics.
• learning from user behavior in the system
• cross-wiki content ; search ; federated
• attribute each word/section to authoring user ; branch table ; branching and merging
• workflow tracking/definition
• views of past versions (wayback machine) ; smart versioning
• collaborative edit patrolling
• what's painful? tables and structured data
• scripting of interactive things
• complex semantics with changes in form/design/structure
• "content modeling"?
• Eugene!! EEKim! that's the fellow here.
• smart granular addressability — linking to a sentence, given the problematic issue of updated
• ways to invite new users into micro-projects / tasks. or to thank them for fixing things. define tasks lists more nicely.
• barnstars (awards) integrated into the system not hidden on a page somewhere. — maybe earning trust and seeing own trust score.
• a trust score or usefulness score — how much did people read a user's stuff. *** very encouraging, for some users

Tangential break period, filling a page with buzzwords — didn't catch why, but maybe to exhaust them from the audience theraputically ("cathartic"), clear the air, then get back to focused specifics

• smart merging
• when viewing a wikipedia page, notification of smart content on the other language wikipedias on this topic — e.g. for deep historical resarch noting many sources cited
• smart citation collection / joining
• sophisticated strict grammar and parser
• problem: management of existing extensions. related Q: what extension systems work well? several say "WordPress"
• EEKim says JSPwiki has a "good" design and a "real" parser with a formal token-based grammar and it's not clear if there are any other wiki softwares that do
• EEKim says SocialText software has more social features, well-integrated
• Erik Moller says wikia has user pages which automatically incorporated

There is a discussion of how to quickly implement any of these.
Convener: Erik Moller and Martin Cleaver
Participants: Many, maybe twenty

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