Anja Haake, Stephan Lukosch, Till Sch?mmer. "Wiki Templates - Adding Structure Support to Wikis on Demand."

Proceedings are available on wikisym.org and through the ACM digital library.

This paper introduces the concept of wiki templates that allows end-users to determine the structure and appearance of a wiki page. In particular, this better supports editing of structured wiki pages. Wiki templates may be adapted (defined and redefined) by end-users. They may be applied if found helpful, but need not to be used, thus maintaining the simple wiki editing way. In addition, we introduce a methodology to reuse wiki templates among different wiki instances. We show how wiki templates have been successfully used in real-world applications in our CURE wiki engine.

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Seb's transcript:

Our university is distance education, so the campus is empty and it feels dark. We wanted to foster an online community.

We introduced a concept of "room" into the wiki. To become a member of a collaborative workspace, users request a key to become part of a room.

Rooms anchor communication. We have room chat, and room bulletin board.

(They have people's faces next to recent changes.)

We ask people to tell something about their job and their real life, when they're doing their studies and when they have time to collaborate. We wanted to support users making structured pages.

One strategy is to seed pages with the initial structure. The problem is that students often don't see clearly where they have to make the edits. Seeding pages are good, but they don't really support readability, prevention of unintentional changes, tailorability, and the sharing of tailored structures.

There are three kinds of things in structured pages: Wiki markup, repeated text, and the actual user content. Our idea is to separate the content, the structure, and the representation.

What we do is, in the wiki markup for the page, replace the user content with <unrenderedText> tags. There is basically one wiki page, the edit template, that specifies the structure, and a companion wiki page, the display template, that specifies how it will display.

When you edit the page, you get a nice form with one box for each field.

Q. (AlainDesilets) Can the user then modify the page?

1. The user can still press edit and go back to the structured form.

Q. I like unstructured content. Of course you can delete stuff in the seed page method.

1. In our experience users need the template to get guidance. In our case we really wanted students to fill in the . You're right, it's problematic because we're taking

Q. For instance, a student might have something interesting to say that doesn't fit the form.

1. We do accomodate freeform sections. You can tailor your template too, I'll talk about it in a second.

One problem is that the structure is static. Users may find out that the template does not fit them anymore. We allow expert users to tailor things. So a person may add a field.

Q. Are those templates global?

1. Yes. If someone changes the template it will affect all pages.

The templates should be shared across spaces. Thus we have "doors" that connect rooms. You can use the templates of all the rooms that are reachable from your room. It's actually a hierarchy of spaces. We have some kind of polymorphism in template use.

Thank you.