AwkiAwki

What is wiki (or wikiwiki)?

wikiwiki pages are community-edittable pages hosted on a server. Anyone can edit them without an account, and they thus provide a means for a community-constructed information and discussion project. They use a very simple markup language to add text conventions (such as bold and italics) which is very rapid to learn (hence 'wiki wiki', which means very fast in Hawaiian). The best example of the information side of Wiki is the Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), and the best example of the discussion/community side is probably the original wikiwiki (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki). Hopefully, everyone plays by community rules of respect and cooperation! Those who abuse the system have their comments deleted. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki for more information. The engine used on this server is AwkiAwki.

What is AwkiAwki

awkiawki is a wikiwiki-clone written in AWK (a simple scripting language, interpreted on this server by GNU gawk: http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/gawk.html). The (open) source is at http://awkiawki.bogosoft.com. Many thanks to the author, Oliver Tonnhofer (olt@bogosoft.com ), and contributors Michael Elkins (me@sigpipe.org ), Francis Daly (francis@daoine.org ), and Jim Hart (jhart@bates.edu ).

Cam (campbell.webb@yale.edu ), who maintains phylodiversity.net, loves AWK, and so was very pleased to see this wiki engine!

Local Wiki conventions

• Please make yourself a personal page, and write PepoMember somewhere on it, with your address and email on it.
• Discussion of topics is encouraged, but please do it only on pages with Discussion in the Link (e.g. TargetJournalDiscussion), and please sign your comments. Editing of other pages is of course encouraged, but only sign edits when a point is likely to be controversial, and the author should therefore be known.

How to participate

1. Learn how to use Wiki (1-2 minutes!),
2. Read through some pages to get the idea,
3. Make your own page (with address and email), so you can sign data entries (by creating a link on the TestPage, clicking on the '?', and editing),
4. Dive in!

The Future

Wikiwiki provides a simple, pre-existing medium for this online collaboration. It's one drawback is that it is freeform, and does not force compliance. We may move to a more structured database in the future.

Using AwkiAwki

How to use it: HowToWriteAwkiAwkiPages

Play with it here: TestPage