Elements of WikiEssence:
- Simple markups for formatting instead of HTML (see TipsForBeginners and TextFormattingRules)
- No markups for links (pages, external links, images, ...)
- content is basically ego-less and time-less (it's not considered important who wrote it and when it was written)
- Hyperlinks appear when referred to (no need to create them).
- Encourages creation of hyperlinks, and always shows which ones are valid. (Showing dead links with '?' really encourages creative WordPlay.)
- RecentChanges (see also ForgetfulnessAsFilter)
- Loss of history (some wikis add a page history)
- Flat namespace (some wikis allow subpages or hierarchies)
Accidents of Wiki implementation:
- Wiki links being resolved by a CGI script.
- Wiki pages being stored
- in the OS file system
- in a database
- as intranet wikis (or CorporateWikis)
- as wikis without public access (http://www.wiki.org)
- as Read Only Wikis
See WikiEssence for discussion