Design and Implementation of Wiki Content Transformations and Refactorings [WikiSym 2013]

Abstract: The organic growth of wikis requires constant attention by contributors who are willing to patrol the wiki and improve its content structure. However, most wikis still only offer textual editing and even wikis which offer WYSIWYG editing do not assist the user in restructuring the wiki. Therefore, “gardening” a wiki is a tedious and error-prone task. One of the main obstacles to assisted restructuring of wikis is the underlying content model which prohibits automatic transformations of the content. Most wikis use either a purely textual representation of content or rely on the representational HTML format. To allow rigorous definitions of transformations we use and extend a Wiki Object Model. With the Wiki Object Model installed we present a catalog of transformations and refactorings that helps users to easily and consistently evolve the content and structure of a wiki. Furthermore we propose XSLT as language for transformation specification and provide working examples of selected transformations to demonstrate that the Wiki Object Model and the transformation framework are well designed. We believe that our contribution significantly simplifies wiki “gardening” by introducing the means of effortless restructuring of articles and groups of articles. It furthermore provides an easily extensible foundation for wiki content transformations.

Keywords: Wiki, Wiki Markup, WM, Wiki Object Model, WOM, Transformation, Refactoring, XML, XSLT, Sweble

Reference: Hannes Dohrn, Dirk Riehle. “Design and Implementation of Wiki Content Transformations and Refactorings.” In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym + OpenSym 2013). ACM, 2013.

The paper is available as a PDF file.

Posted on

Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Share the Joy

Share on LinkedIn

Share by email

Share on Twitter / X

Share on WhatsApp

Featured Startups

QDAcity makes qualitative research and qualitative data analysis fun and easy.
EDITIVE makes inter- and intra-company document collaboration more effective.

Featured Projects

Making free and open data easy, safe, and reliable to use
Bringing business intelligence to engineering management
Making open source in products easy, safe, and fun to use