All the pages in a wiki have a name, the WikiName. Such a name is made of several capitalized words without spaces, JustLikeThis?. This seems to be the most prevalent link pattern. These names are automatically recognized by the WikiEngine and transformed into local hyperlinks -- they link to the page with that name.
This makes writing a wiki page a lot like writing a web page. With one major difference: Writing wiki pages is a lot easier than writing HTML pages. Linking is automatic. Formatting is automatic. The only drawback is loss of layout flexibility. But who needs that, anyway.
This particular wiki was written using WikiMode. All page names consist of several words. All the words are capitalized and smashed together. There are never two consecutive capital letter in a name. There are at least two words and therefore two capital letters in a name. This constrains the name space available to pages. At the same time, the page name is the only title the page has. Therefore authors tend to choose page titles carefully: They try to find a short and descriptive names.
If pages have short and descriptive names, other people will tend to link to them: While writing other pages, they want to create a link, but they don't know wether an appropriate page exists. As the namespace is constrained, they might as well just go ahead and write a WikiName -- not knowing wether the page actually exists or not. As links to nonexisting pages invite the readers to provide content, the WikiWiki grows.
This technique works even in a one-person WikiWiki: Things I'd like to mention, I write as a WikiName. If I write something up later, the link is automatically created. If I don't write anything up, the mail link invites readers to send me mail on the missing page.
SiteMap / AllPages / Out / kensanata@yahoo.com / Last change: 2001-03-03