You can’t browse the web too long before you run into a Wiki… a group colaboration tool that allows multiple authors to work on the same page. Sounds intriguing, but it doesn’t allow for out-of-band comments between the authors, so they often just drop them inline.

So many voices talking to themselves and not to me, and only seldom glancing up to notice their audience blinking in confusion (see this example).

So I have some ideas that would improve things considerably…

1. Perhaps the idea could be to have “views” of the page… with some meta-information and out-of-band data (like internal page composition comments) not displayed unless you ask, and if so, they are in a different column and not in-lined. Of course, you could line up the comments next to the text they are discussing…

2. The engine should automatically create links, not based on some weird mixed casing, but based on a hash of already known (and named) pages. Spelling things like CeeSharp and OtherInformationAboutCrap isn’t useful or helpful.

3. Since we are talking text with lots of hyperlinks, the external hyperlinks should also be out-of-band. Consider writing something like Markdown’s formatting: see [this hyperlink][12] for details and then in another field box list the URL associated with link 12.

4. It would be nice to add plugins, like Java’s doclets, so that you could use the same base, but add the features you need. Each plugin could scan the contents looking for the character sequences that it recognizes and then converts it. The result is then piped to the next guy. Some plugins could add addition fields to the composition page, so that you can add even more out-of-band data that the templates could recognize.

5. Speaking of features, there are a plethora of Wikis, each with its own features, so choosing one would be difficult, but features like versioning control and creating templates (ala blogging engines) that can display parts of the page’s information or create different views, would be swell.

If I ever get ambitious enough to write this, I’m going to call it Kiwi since it is like a Wiki, but then again, it isn’t. Of course, I’m sure someone already already done all of this, so I should just get busy enough to locate it.