The wiki address: where its subjects are now
For many years this address ran a wiki script: links of the form /wiki.cgi?PageName opened pages on volunteer networks, peace work, offline participation and open hardware. That wiki is gone. The Working Commons, an independent publication now using the domain, has written new articles on the same subjects, and old links lead to them.
Subjects and where to read about them
| Old wiki page | Our article |
|---|---|
| Endeavors | How volunteer networks turn ideas into projects |
| HelpKenyans | Kenya, 2007–2008: online volunteers and the post-election crisis |
| OpenSourceEcology | Open Source Ecology: published blueprints for basic machines |
| FlashDriveEditor | A wiki on a flash drive: editing offline and syncing later |
| Offline | Reaching people who are offline |
| Values | Putting shared values into words |
| UKOnlineCommunities | UK online centres and community networks |
| AndriusKulikauskas | A factual note on Andrius Kulikauskas |
| SashaMrkailo | About this name |
How a CGI wiki worked
Early wikis were often a single script on a web server, written in Perl or Python and run through the Common Gateway Interface. The script read the page name from the query string after the question mark, loaded a text file of the same name, converted its simple markup to HTML and sent the result to the browser. Editing worked the same way in reverse: a form posted the new text back to the script, which saved it, usually keeping the previous versions. Page names were written in "CamelCase", words run together with capitals, so that any such word in the text became a link automatically.
The design was cheap and robust, which is why so many small communities used it in the late 1990s and 2000s. Its weaknesses were spam, which forced most open wikis to add logins or captchas, and fragility: when the hosting account or domain lapsed, the whole wiki disappeared at once. Our article on archiving a community's conversations explains how to avoid that fate.
About this publication
The Working Commons has no connection with the people or project behind the former wiki and does not continue it. See about this domain for details.