Wiki Document Proposal

Problem Statement #

For many people, wikis are a reasonable solution for creating and managing both a single document or collection of documents critical to their business and business transactions. The current approach in the wiki community involves attaching this material to a wiki article (page), while relegating the article itself to the role of a bibliographic record about the attached document(s) and other material.

Though reasonable in view of current technology, this approach is inadequate.

1. bibliographic data in the article can be/come incorrect and or incomplete with respect to relevant information within the document; confusion can easily ensue when more than one attachment exists for the article
2. groupware mechanisms popularized by the wiki community cannot be applied to internal fragments of such documents, often duplicating similar mechanisms provided by the attachments' associated software applications
3. no distinction exists between those documents formally the subject of the wiki, and reference documents that are attached to the wiki, creating confusion for and manually-bridged gaps between the wiki and other tools
4. semantic information contained within the document is effectively invisible to wiki engines, unable to be correlated with pertinent semantic information held elsewhere within the wiki, thereby causing information to be potentially entered more than once

As wikis are adapted to natively represent generic and specialized documents, current wiki syntax appears inadequate for representing

• the logical/structural elements comprising a document that are captured and displayed, individually or as part of a collection, by one or more wiki articles and display pages.
• the physical elements relevant to document display/print
• the semantic information within the content of the document

Creole Requirements #

Standardizing a syntax to transmit document-, article- & page-level information would broaden the audience for and utility of wikis in a significant manner.

Should this be pursued within this group ??? #