Wiki Federation Overview

How do you deal with having lots and lots of topic names? What happens if Wiki really takes off at a big place like Microsoft or the State of California?

If there's one big Wiki, we're going to have a serious problem with topic name collisions (your "LinkAlgorithm" is not the same as my "LinkAlgorithm"!). If there are many Wikis, what about linking between them? WikiFederation gives us the best of both worlds: easy linking and a way to distinguish names that are "the same."

A WikiBase is a collection of topics all in the same TopicNamespace. Each WikiBase also has a collection of namespaces that it "knows" about (see ImportNamespaceIntoWikiBase). Whenever you type a Wiki name in the middle of a topic, it's actually "resolved" by looking through the WikiBase holding the topic and all of the imported namespaces. This makes it really easy to talk about topics that are in related areas and have the system take care of the linking for you automatically.

A collection of WikiBases are organized into a WikiFederation (there's only one of these in any given big place [e.g., Merisel the State of California]; maybe there will only need to be one for the whole world???).

Linking directly to topics in other namespaces is as simple as typing OtherNamespace.TopicName or OtherNamespace.[name].

Nearby

FederationConfiguration, FlexWikiTerminology, ContentBaseDefinition

Question

What I would like to see is a scoping of the various topic grouping levels and how they implement themselves on the file system. I think it goes as follows, from Biggest to smallest. WikiFederation > TopicNamespace > WikiTopic So in the link above (http://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/FlexWiki.WikiNamespace) FlexWiki is the TopicNamespace and WikiNamespace is a WikiTopic, right? Where is the Federation and how would it represent itself on this site?

Answer

You're right - in your example, FlexWiki is the namespace, and WikiNamespace is the topic name. The Federation is sort of invisible, in the sense that it doesn't really have a page. But you can think of it as corresponding to the installation of FlexWiki, or to the virtual directory. That is, the URL that most closely corresponds to the federation is http://www.flexwiki.com/${0} Everything below there is part of the federation. -- CraigAndera [2004-09-01]

Answer2

And... on the file system it works like this: the federation is defined in a single XML configuration file called the NamespaceMap. This lists the WikiNamespaces and a directory that corresponds to the namespace. In this directory, you'll find all the topics for that namespace. Each topics is its own "TopicName.wiki" file (and each version of the topic is stored in a .wiki file that's named in a similar way but whose name also incorporates the name of the author of the revision and the associated timestamp). -- DavidOrnstein

Question

Can this be used to link to other sites? Such as WikiPedia.[Wiki] (which would then link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki).

Answer

Use InterWikiBehaviors to provide that functionality, as in @@InterWiki("WikiPedia", "Wiki", "Wiki")@@

Question

So, can Namespaces be Nested?

Question

I have added a namespace such that it appears on the left hand pane. The folders have been created on the server to match the topic name. Whenever anyone clicks on the topic name however, the following error appears: "Server Error in '/' Application. Object reference not set to an instance of an object." Whenever I look at the NamespaceMap.xml file, I notice that the corresponding entry does not exist. I could fake all of it except that ProviderID, which looks like it is automagically generated. How does that take place? Did I miss something in the namespace creation process?

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