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Distributed wikis: a survey
Author(s) -
Davoust Alan,
SkafMolli Hala,
Molli Pascal,
Esfandiari Babak,
Aslan Khaled
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.3439
Subject(s) - viewpoints , computer science , world wide web , context (archaeology) , data science , peer to peer , collaborative editing , scheme (mathematics) , knowledge management , art , paleontology , mathematical analysis , mathematics , visual arts , biology
Summary ‘Distributed wiki’ is a generic term covering various systems, including ‘peer‐to‐peer wiki’, ‘mobile wiki’, ‘offline wiki’, ‘federated wiki’ and others. Distributed wikis distribute their pages among the sites of autonomous participants to address various motivations, including high availability of data, new collaboration models and different viewpoints of subjects. Although existing systems share some common basic concepts, it is often difficult to understand the specificity of each one, the underlying complexities or the best context in which to use it. In this paper, we define, classify and characterize distributed wikis. We identify three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme for its pages: highly available wikis, decentralized social wikis and federated wikis. We classify existing distributed wikis according to these classes. We detail their underlying complexities and social and technical motivations. We also highlight some directions for research and opportunities for new systems with original social and technical motivations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.