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What is Wicked?

:Contact: [email protected]

Contents

This software is OSI Certified Open Source Software. OSI Certified is a certification mark of the Open Source Initiative.

Goals

1. To Facilitate Maintaining a Knowledge Base ---------------------------------------------

In order to facilitate maintaining a knowledge base, Wicked must make it as easy as possible to enter information. If the user encounters impediments when entering information, he or she will be less likely to enter information. The goal as Wicked evolves, then, is to remove as many impediments to entry as possible.

Here are some technological impediments we should be mindful of:

• Requiring complete documents or validatation which prevents saving.
• Requiring lots of information related to pages (categories, etc.).
• Complicated markup which has to be learned.

We should be mindful that not all impediments are strictly technological - there are psychological impediments as well. As a simple example, different fonts and ways of rendering a page may make it appear more "professional" or "perfect", and this might discourage a user from adding his thoughts somewhere near the middle. Another example: a strongly implied organizational structure for a wiki might discourage someone from contributing some discussion that does not fit into any of the predefined slots.

One of the most important factors that will encourage a person to add information to a knowledge base is whether he or she find useful information in it. If a user keeps coming back to it to search for useful information, that user is more likely to contribute.

1. To Facilitate Inter-connecting Knowledge -------------------------------------------

The value of a large knowledge base isn't solely in the amount of information it contains. There are many large knowledge bases which are difficult to navigate, and seem to prevent you from finding things that you know must be in there. One of the ways to avoid this is by facilitating the inter-connectedness of knowledge - if we make linking between pages easy, don't prevent (and even encourage) "dangling" and "accidental" links, and provide mechanisms so that synonymous terms can refer to the same page, knowledge in the knowledge base will be much more accessible.

1. To Facilitate Peer Review and Discussion of Content ------------------------------------------------------

The openness of a wiki is one of its great strengths; it allows anyone to add their opinions or references to facts or whatever. One of the most unique goals of Wicked is to find new mechanisms to facilitate this. For example, allowing people to subscribe to a page, area, or the entire wiki to receive change notifications keeps people coming back to topics that they are interested in, and adding their opinions.

Adding an "invite" feature which allows a user to solicit input from a third party increases traffic and discussion on a topic and also gives Wicked a sort of one-shot single-topic mailing list feature. It also provides a mechanism for publishing information, for example to release a memo in an organization.

1. To Facilitate Accuracy Through Accountability ------------------------------------------------

There are only two ways to know whether information is accurate: 1) to have an idea of the accuracy of the source of that information or 2) to test it. In most document-management-type solutions, permissions systems are used to ensure that only authorized users can modify documents, but in wiki we recognize that permissions are an impediment to contribution.

Although Wicked does support setting permissions for pages, accuracy in wiki is provided by tracking changes made to pages so that we always know where the information came from. This also increases the quality of the content by providing accountability.

1. To Facilitate Paper Publishing ---------------------------------

Once the collaboration on some piece of knowledge is done, Wicked should support printing it in a "final form" useful for consumption.

Features

1. Change Tracking and Revision History ---------------------------------------
2. Full-Text Searching ----------------------
3. Support for Multiple Content Types -------------------------------------

Not implemented yet.

1. Page and Site Subscriptions and Invitations ----------------------------------------------

Not implemented yet.

1. Typesetting to PDF ---------------------

Not implemented yet. Exporting wiki pages to Latex is already possible though. It is still planned to export complete wikis or "books" (sets of wiki pages).

Obtaining Wicked

Further information on Wicked and the latest version can be obtained at

http://www.horde.org/apps/wicked

Documentation

The following documentation is available in the Wicked distribution:

:README: This file :LICENSE: Copyright and license information :doc/CHANGES: Changes by release :doc/CREDITS: Project developers :doc/INSTALL: Installation instructions and notes :doc/TODO: Development TODO list

Installation

Instructions for installing Wicked can be found in the file INSTALL in the doc/ directory of the Wicked distribution.

Assistance

If you encounter problems with Wicked, help is available!

The Horde Frequently Asked Questions List (FAQ), available on the Web at

http://wiki.horde.org/FAQ

Horde LLC runs a number of mailing lists, for individual applications and for issues relating to the project as a whole. Information, archives, and subscription information can be found at

http://www.horde.org/community/mail

Lastly, Horde developers, contributors and users also make occasional appearances on IRC, on the channel #horde on the Freenode Network (irc.freenode.net).

Licensing

For licensing and copyright information, please see the file LICENSE in the Wicked distribution.

Thanks,

The Wicked team