The Internet was originally conceived to improve communication between far-flung researchers. Today, of course, the Internet can be used by anyone, virtually anywhere, to send and receive information of all kinds. Email, newsgroups, web sites, and more recently, blogs, and RSS feeds are all methods to share information.
The Internet was originally conceived to improve communication between far-flung researchers. Today, of course, the Internet can be used by anyone, virtually anywhere, to send and receive information of all kinds. Email, newsgroups, web sites, and more recently, blogs, and RSS feeds are all methods to share information.
While all of those forms of communication are popular and effective, they’re also implicitly static: an article in a newsgroup can’t be changed once it’s posted, and the content of a web page is typically maintained and controlled by the page’s owner. Certainly, people can post replies to groups and submit comments to a web site’s forums, but even that new material remains as standalone, static amendments to the original content.
Wikis, on the other hand, are implicitly collaborative. Content — any content — in the wiki can be changed, extended, or created anew at any time by any user (although some access controls are typically available). In fact, a wiki is largely a content management system, where the wiki itself is just one way to organize and present the information.
And that’s the kernel of the idea behind TikiWiki, or just Tiki, an expansive wiki that also provides for articles, file and image galleries, forums, weblogs, and many other forms of sharing information. At more than 250,000 lines of code, and more than 375 different features, the Tiki developers describe their work as “A catch-all PHP application, so you don’t have to install…
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