Title: Concepts of Wiki Spaces

Traction spaces are most often used for some combination of knowledge management (where wiki page naming is a useful feature) and communication (where page naming is not necessary - and a distraction). Accordingly, the defaults are such that page naming is optional but can made a forced requirement in a given space.

A space in Traction can be configured to make it easy for groups to author and organize articles to create "wiki-style" websites, such as www.wikipedia.org or the online Documentation space that you are reading right now. Indeed, while providing the key features needed for creating wikis, Traction TeamPage goes well beyond these to meet the needs of enterprise users.

Some basic concepts of a wiki are to:

  1. Make it easy for a number of people to jointly author and edit pages in a workspace or site
  2. Maintain a "name space" where all wiki page names are unique (and allow for assignment of page name aliases to any given page)
  3. Make it possible to link easily from one article to another by using a page name and common syntax "[[Your Page]]" or a link tool


Traction TeamPage meets these requirements, plus:

  1. Integrates these capabilities with all of the security featues and enterprise weblog support inherent in Traction's architecture
  2. Extends the concept of assigning page name aliases to allow for Global Page Names (where the Namespace is independent from any space, but points to a given article in a given space) and allow for assigning cross-project aliases (allowing you to assign a page name in one space to an article in another space).
  3. Displays "incoming" links (in a Referenced By list) but screens the links based on the reader's permission to read (or read draft) in the spaces which contain articles linking to a given article/page.
  4. Provides Page and Comment Moderation that makes it easy to divide authoring and publishing roles and maintain a stable view of published content while an updating process is underway
  5. Allows "fearless refactoring" of page names during rework given the sophisticated Page Name Management and Name History capabilities provided


When a project administrator configures the space to use a wiki template and settings, the following are generally true:



The use of the Moderated Publishing model to allow articles to have both Draft and Published states/versions is optional and is not limited to use with wiki-style spaces. However, it will frequently be used with wiki-style spaces, as their content is often created and maintained as formal online documentation.



Related Articles
Article: Doc522 (permalink)
Date: December 26, 2008; 7:25:50 PM Eastern Standard Time

Author Name: Paul Needham
Author ID: pan