A while back I created the ConflictWiki as an open source and independent wiki hosting cross-cultural (institutionally speaking) content. The target communities included, but isn’t restricted to, those studying "hybrid wars," counterterrorism, intelligence, private military companies, private intelligence companies, peacekeeping and peacemaking, reconstruction and stabilization, and public diplomacy.
ConflictWiki.org was to be the clearing house for information and it was off to a good start with a large number of entries created (many by the blogger Bourbon and Lawndarts).
I was never happy with the wiki interface as I wanted to structure the content to make it easy to read by both human and machine for easy extraction into other systems. I have been looking at migrating off the wiki platform with its arcane (to me) formatting language to the MovableType platform.
Short list of advantages of MovableType:
- easy blog style / HTML editing
- entries can have comments like blogs (using "pages" of MT 4.x, these are similar to but not blog entries)
- hierarchical filing
- easy cross linking
Short list of advantages of the MediaWiki platform:
- changes to entries easily tracked and discussed
- can comment on entries
- not hiearchical
What are your thoughts? Nothing has yet filled the gap ConflictWiki was intended to fill. It’s time to breathe new life into it but what direction do we — it’s a collaborate effort — take it? Stay with Wiki? Go to MovableType? Another platform?
Addition:What I want, in a sentence:
An group / open blog with daily, empirical, free, and informative posts on all aspects of conflict (readable via RSS). Especially if the posts are on topics outside of my typical area of reading / knowledge.
I would love to work on a ConflictWiki. I vote for MT and a slight twist to your idea:What I would like to see is not so much a straight wiki, but rather an “open blog”. In other words, a wiki I can subscribe to with an RSS feed. With mediawiki you can only subscribe to “recent changes”.
As a content reader, everyday I want to receive in my feedreader a new, factual, and non-opinionated post on conflict. Think of it as a learning tool, wherein everyday subscribers to the RSS feed get to read about Quadrennial Defense Review, the Barrack Buster, etc…
As a content writer, what I want is for my writings to be read and the probability of that is greatly increased if there is an RSS feed.
Will it be a quick reference encyclopedia still, or more a collection of posts?
It is to be reference much like Wikipedia is, except tailored for and by consumers of the information.