Wiki: Designing a Smarter Wiki Why wiki? “annoyed with overstructure of other systems that forces you to work in a predetermined way. You can do a big hunk of what’s needed in a CMS with wiki, but in a way that people like better because they create the workflow & structure that works best for them.”

The conceptual model of the wiki is extremely clear and doesn’t have to be studied to be understood – it just works. “Why wiki succeeds over more brittle software is that it makes no assumptions about what people will do with it. It is the “simplest thing that could possibly work,” and the applications/domains to which it is put are wide open and free ranging. This is also what makes the Internet itself work so well.”

An important question this is how to introduce lightweight, somewhat automatic ways to organize content without interfering with the simple operation of the wiki. One answer is the use of tags to identify similar groups of pages, i.e. topic pages, user pages, reference pages, ad hoc collaboration pages, etc. By using tags, people can narrow searches to a single group of pages instead of the whole wiki, create wiki pages that display a list of all pages with a particular tag, and subscribe to tags to easily keep track of a whole group of pages.