but the thing about wiki is it conatins many different ideas each of them where an eye opener to social software developers, it is these seperate ideas that are revolutionary and they're finding their way in all sorts of webapps seperatly.

the way I think of it Wikis introduced

• collaborative editing of docsuments using CVS style workflow
• no user classification at all, all users have the same rights
• workflow is transparent to end audience
• simplified structural markup readable by mere mortals
• cheap page creating (on the fly)
• flexible sitewide crossreferencing engine (on the fly)
• the revolutionary idea of managing information as a soup of unordered data plus the ability to create different views and organization for it (it could be cross linked, chained, put in a heirarchy, searched for etc, all easily cheaply and at the same time).
• the most revolutinary idea of letting humans manage the system not computers, while giving us human operators tools to make life easier (basically by making mistakes cost nothing and cause no chain reactions)

again Wikis are example of total seperation of policy and mechanism, a wiki gives you mechanism, wiki authors invent policy, many CMS systems are copying this idea (drupal is very much that), Wikis are the only ones where the policy is organic and ever changing and requires no further agreement.

the reason why there is a mess is because porogrammers do see these features or properties as seperate, non of them are the esence of wiki that has to be stabilized at some point in time.

a unified syntax would be nice but any attempt at making a syntax flexible enough to accomodate all needs will simply reinvent XML.

tab3an the situation would probably have been helped if either the first WikiWikiWeb or MediaWiki had the best syntax (seeing as they're obvious leaders) but truth is their syntax sucks in many ways.

cheers, Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"