Design Principle for Wikis

As we on the verge of site development, my publisher come up with the idea of Wiki. He asked me if that vision would be possible. He receives positive remarks from us and he tackles his plan to create a wiki counterpart of the popular Wikipedia. So, as we build for the Philippine's first ever Wiki project, we have to research on its fundamental structure. Know also why it gains popular and how the whole site works. Now, I have able to identify my primary concern- designing a wiki.
  • Open - a page could be found incomplete, poorly organized so any reader can edit it as they see fit.
  • Incremental - Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet.
  • Organic - The structure and text content of the site are open to editing and evolution.
  • Mundane - A small number of (irregular) text conventions will provide access to the most useful page markup.
  • Universal - The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of writing so that any writer is automatically an editor and organizer.
  • Overt - The formatted (and printed) output will suggest the input required to reproduce it.
  • Unified - Page names will be drawn from a flat space so that no additional context is required to interpret them.
  • Precise - Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.
  • Tolerant - Interpretable (even if undesirable) behavior is preferred to error messages.
  • Observable - Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any other visitor to the site.
  • Convergent - Duplication can be discouraged or removed by finding and citing similar or related content.
And for us developers. Here are some additional principles that might guide us, but were not of primary concern to me.
  • Trust - This is the most important thing in a wiki. Trust the people, trust the process, enable trust-building. Everyone controls and checks the content. Wiki relies on the assumption that most readers have good intentions.
  • Fun - Everybody can contribute; nobody has to.
  • Sharing - of information, knowledge, experience, ideas...
On Comments:
  • Interaction - Enables guest interaction.
  • Collaboration - We believe that this could make a good collaboration tool, both synchronously and asynchronously.
  • Platforms - We like the cross-platform implications.

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