All In One Wiki

What about an AllInOneWiki for a WikiWayOfLife?

This is contrasted to a special purpose wiki.

The two concepts

It might not scale. Maybe an AllInOneWiki needs to serve a small community, and a special purpose wiki can serve a bigger one. -- DaveHarris, AnonymousDonors

ThankYou for the provoking statement. You may be right to see the envisioned AllInOneWiki as just another one precursor special purpose wiki, realized in a conventional plain text wiki. I see it just the other way round. An AllInOneWiki is like a One Stop Mall, which attracts masses. That doesn't exclude special purpose wikis as subsystems contained in this supermarket or external special purpose systems, that are linked and cooperating with the AllInOneWiki. Another view is to see the AllInOneWiki as the growing net of dynamically just in time created interlinked special purpose wikis. It seems to me a concept that scales like the WorldWideWeb. -- fp

To be more precise, I don't think RecentChanges scales well. If there are lots of people contributing, it will necessarily get too long and the sense of Not much more though. If you sorted RecentChanges based on CategoryFoo? tags (possibly multiple) contained in the recently changed pages, you could easily filter out categories you would be interested in. People would naturally be inclined to start categorizing pages as they edited them, too, so this can be easily backspooged onto the existing system. However, this will likely make the WikiMind schizophrenic. -- SunirShah (signed for responsibility)

Imagine: So, I can write a page in my wiki, then publish it to any group wikis appropriate (family, community center, etc.). My wiki can automatically download pages I set it to (e.g., all pages on RecentChanges for these x wikis) for off-line reading (anyone interested in PalmWiki-synching with a directory?). Group wikis can share sets of pages (e.g. instructions for wiki usage appropriate to their audience, overlapping content, overlapping 'off-topic' pages, etc.), by mirroring and/or on-command gets and puts. Receiving wikis can replace, append, or eventually more-cleverly merge if there are two page contents. There can be larger federated wikis. There might be a GlobalWiki? but I'm not sure it would matter. Every wiki has choice about how it interacts with each other wiki. Over the long run wikis are born and die, fork and merge. -- JohnAbbe

This was exactly what came to my mind after the first use of wiki at home as a PIM. Are there any news concerning this approach? - See also my sketch below - FlorianKonnertz, 0910

I agree with you that the question if a GlobalWiki? will be or is, is not important anymore. -- FloK

I'm busy (thinking of) setting up a wiki at work at the moment so that everyone can share and alter documentation in a relaxed manner. The only problem is deciding which pages to refer new people to (eg. WikiWiki and WikiWikiSandbox, etc.)... If the elements that are common between different wiki implementations were in one WikiMother? then the WikiChild? could cache and refer to those pages.

Also, I was thinking of saving and caching certain pages from wikis that are common to us (we're programmers) with a tag at the top indicating where they came from and possibly no means of editing them. That means that the pages can "feel" like they're a part of our server and can use the same wiki mechanisms that make Most of the popular WikiEngines already have a default database with the relevant information. MeatBall:JerryMuelver has a quick install database for more MeatballWiki-looking UseModWikis?. See the section entitled, "Wiki in a file" on his namepage on MeatballWiki.

Hello! I had this idea, too. Here are my current thoughts...

Where is the borderline/interface of one's personal wiki to all the public wikis out there? What about the following approach: Everybody (who wants) should have a personal wiki. This wiki is where he really is at home because everything in it once went through his fingers (through his eyes). Not everything was written by him, but all the abstracts and copied sites are composited by him.

And then there is the public version of his personal wiki. This is optional. One could participate only to other public wikis. But if you decide to make your personal

There should be a mark on each page or better on each part /paragraph of all pages of your personal wiki where some symbols show you on which wikis you already copied this page.

This is like a profile manager. How do you manage your personal homepage? You have a personal homepage (, which is your central place to keep your personal data up-to-date. On this homepage you might have the public version of your personal wiki and your weblog (connected to this wiki).

Some provocating questions: How do you manage all your different wikis and your contributions to it? Do you synchronize your own sites regularly and keep them uptodate?

Which features/requirements would this approach provide/have?

Handling modes:

With a perfect system configuration the borders between your personal wiki and the WorldWiki? will disappear. All new contributions from others arrive on your screen and seem to exist in your personal environment. Vice versa everything you write is done at first to your PersonalPrivateWiki? and copied/broadcast then to the locations in the collective space, where it should go according to the configuration.

A few mixed additional thoughts:

These were my -- FlorianKonnertz, 0910

Well, you can be sure, as soon as I hear of it, I'll post such a project to AbbeNormal. Eventually it will get here of course. It sounds like you have a fairly complete vision of wiki's potential future. I imagine that the whole question of having two sites negotiate what to do with a suggested page change will be the interesting thread to follow for some time. This is beyond AllInOneWiki though, maybe better on InterWiki or ???. -- JohnAbbe

Probably this has also something to do with it: Wiki:PersonalWikiPortal. -- FloK

Musing these thoughts since my wiki experience started, check out MeatBall:OneBigWiki and the project at -- MarkDilley French

Filtering RecentChanges based on categories is interesting. Another thing that might be interesting (though it's certainly not the simplest thing that could possibly work), would be preference training via Bayes logic or otherwise. For example, in RecentChanges, give 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' buttons to mark personal "Yeah, I'd like to see more of this." In addition, you'll want to use something like RandomPages or RandomRecentChanges to prevent self-selection inbreeding (the phenomenon often seen in keyword-based news aggregators, where FalseNegative?s start killing stories that would be of interest).

CategoryWiki CategoryDiscussion
