3. What Is a Wiki?

A Wiki is a kind of a website, where anyone who is reading the site can also edit it. While the LDP isn't going to implement that kind of permissive editing, we do really like the way the Wiki editing works. Instead of having to learn html tags, you enter your information in plain text. The Wiki software takes that plain text, and converts it into html to display it.

In our case, we convert not into html, but into DocBook. Then that DocBook gets fed into our regular publication systems just as if you had written it in DocBook originally.

If you've never used a WikiWikiWeb, see http://www.wikipedia.com for a good example of a thriving Wiki.

Common functions like creating a link, a bulleted list, a numbered list, and section headings are made quick and easy. We wanted to provide that same level of ease for LDP authors, so I wrote a utility that would take a text format similar to the one used in Wikis (we call it WikiText), and combine it with the meta-data in the LDP Database to generate DocBook.