Re: [syndication] Wiki

[Rael Dornfest <rael@oreilly.com>]

Howdy,

I've been toying with this idea for some time now but simply have not had
the time to implement it.  

This could happen in a couple of ways (or more, I'm sure):

* Changed Pages
Most Wikis sport a Changed Pages page or the like; since this is already
done, it'd be trivial to do it as RSS rather than HTML.  But this isn't
perhaps the most interesting possibility.

* WikiPage -> RSS
There's no reason why any particular Wiki page couldn't have an associated
RSS feed.  After all, they're simply pages filled with text and links just
like a Weblog.  There'd have to be some extrapolation similar to what I've
seen in Weblogs.  Things like first link in a paragraph is <link>, linked
text is <title>, and the next n characters or first n sentences are the
<description>

My interest in Wikis and RSS actually brought me to the conclusion that
there must be some way of doing a Semantic Wiki where markup is semantic
rather than display-oriented in nature.  Much the same way as XML markup
applies meaning (sorta) to a document rather than the majority of HTML
which is all about how things look.  So, for instance, just as **foo**
becomes <b>foo</b> in some Wiki markup, why not a(Rael) to mean
<dc:author>Rael</dc:author> or s(foo,bar,baz) to mean
<dc:subject>foo,bar,baz</dc:subject>.  

These semantic bits could also, mind you, be associated with display
format so you get two birds with one stone.

While I've only presented some rather simple (simplistic?) examples, this
could go so much further and be as simple or advanced as a user's needs.


 On Sat, 9 Jun 2001, Mike Krus wrote:

> Julian Bond wrote:
> 
> > Do Wikis produce RSS? Could they? Does the question even make sense?
> wikis are not lists, so it would be difficult. Could list of
> 
> latest entries etc.
> 
> One thing I wanted to try some day would be to generate wiki
> entries from headlines, more or less automatically. Would be
> very interesting to watch how (if indeed) items start linking
> to each other using wikiwords...

Mike, this is a fascinating idea!  I was wondering the same thing when I
came across Wikis fed by mailing lists.  Each email message was its own
page with subject becoming title and message-id the Wiki page id.

Rael