WCN 2012/101wiki - Wikimedia

Community and ontology support for the 101wiki

The 101companies community project combines an open-source repository, a MediaWiki-based wiki (“101wiki”), and additional metadata to organize and present knowledge about software languages and software technologies. The richly (semi-) structured 101wiki distinguishes pages for implementations (of the 101companies system), software languages, software technologies, software concepts, stakeholders (of the 101companies project), ideas for progress with the project, and others. 101wiki leverages MediaWiki idioms and capabilities such as categories, markup, plugins for extra content (e.g., inferred cross-references), and API-based functionality (e.g., for import/export and refactoring).

101wiki needs to see major improvements shortly. There is a need for advanced authentication, distributed repository support, discussion support, various other community features, advanced document refactoring, template-based content management, and a general push towards ontology engineering subject to emerging guidelines. Technologies other than MediaWiki, e.g., semantic wikis and content management systems, have been evaluated to determine their fitness for meeting the aforementioned improvements. Also, the development of a new wiki system was considered and investigated up to some point. Currently, though, the plan is to incrementally improve 101wiki within the bounds of MediaWiki since no migration path was found to be viable or reliable enough in terms of available resources and attainable features.

During WCN, the 101companies project will be briefly introduced and the role of the MediaWiki-based 101wiki will be described so that the aforementioned improvements can be itemized and the challenges around their realization can be put up for discussion. Indeed, the expectation is that the WCN audience will be both interested in the complex needs of 101companies and helpful in providing advice on meeting the expected improvements rapidly and cheaply.