Peter Marks

I work for the once (and future?) NCR on mechanisms and practices to create and enhance a spirit of community for geographically distributed workgroups.

I'm interested in Wiki as an alternative - annotated documents - to news threads for discussions centered around the content of a draft document. I'll try to install it on both Unix and NT webservers.

[5/28] I did get wiki running on some Unix servers, but I developed such a dislike to our NT server that I lost interest in that port.

I got diverted to a distance learning project that I really would have liked to use wiki for, but I couldn't sell the universal editing as a feature. The instructor wanted to enforce certain minimum content formats - necessitating some kind of mandatory forms, and we wanted that only the author of individual "reports" could change the report text (though interleaved annotation by others probably would have been all right.

So the only idea from wiki that really got applied was the that of a simple markup language. I think it was useful for getting the students - mostly *real* net, and even computer, newbies - to try "publishing" on the web; but because they were so new - never even used email before - they really had no background of "natural" conventions to use for motivation of the specific markup rules (a lot of them weren't even used to empty lines as paragraph separators). I ended up using the wiki conventions for lists, but

 *text* for emphasis
 !text! for strong emphasis
 [url|text] for anchors