XWiki for Online Communities

Collaborative tools

A Wiki is a great tool for online communities, allowing them to collaboratively work on documents, write a knowledge base, and share experiences that the members can build on step by step.

A Wiki is a Internet web site where users can edit the content of the page that they view, as long as they are authorized:

• A spelling error ? Any authorized member can immediately make the correction.
• A missing point of view in a document ? Any authorized member can add it and enrich the content.

Thanks to the RSS feeds, members are notified of any modifications in the Wiki and can react quickly.

With the "History" button, members can compare versions, view modifications and even rollback to a previous version if it is considered better. Keeping the full history also makes vandalism inneficient as destroyed content can always be restored. It is also a protection against mistakes made by members of the community. Members of the community now can safely participate without fear of breaking anything.

Blogs and Wikis are complementary tools. A blog is organized by date and existing articles are replaced by more recent articles. A Wiki is meant to be a reference that evolves over time. A blog article has one author which he or she uses mainly as a communication tool. Articles in a Wiki can have many authors as they constitute a collective work.

XWiki combines Blogs and Wikis in the same tool to allow your community to communicate and build a self-describing reference.

Communities at Work

• Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a web encyclopedia project using a Wiki (it does not use XWiki, but the principles are the same). Each user is free - and even encouraged - to contribute by adding articles, by adding corrections or by enriching the content of existing articles. For example, it is possible to look at the entry on "Online communities" in the English language version. A link entitled "Edit" exists to the right of each section that allows you to modify the section or to add a link to a new article that you can create.

• Mandriva Club

Mandriva Club is the online community of Mandriva users (ex MandrakeSoft - a Linux distribution competing with RedHat and Novell-Suse) which has been implemented with XWiki. Here, reading and searching features are open to all, but editing is reserved to community members. Notice the example of the online documentation which can be enriched by all members. Who hasn't sworn against unclear software documentation that is not up to date, incomplete and lacking examples ? When a MandrivaClub member has a problem, the discussion forum with support is very useful, but once the problem has been solved, the solution disappears in the ongoing threads. A Wiki allows you to copy and paste the useful part of the discussion in order to directly update the documentation and to accumulate experience in a structured body of knowledge