Wiki Patterns

This pattern describes a situation where structured information needs to be edited by several persons. Regularly, this “modeling” is done by using office documents, spreadsheets in particular.

The usage of Wikis is superior to conventional forms of collaboration, because you are able to express multidimensional n:m relationships. This is in particular the case if you do not know the cardinality of relationships during modeling.

• Add Metadata to pages
• Use automatically generated overviews to use metadata on other pages, in particular overview pages

Take process documentation as example. Here you have multidimensional n:m relationships (e.g., a process links roles and products). Furthermore, overview texts (like a short description of the process) can be included in each page and used for navigation.

I am not sure whether Confluence offers features to create overviews based on metadata. The semantic mediawiki (in particular, the ask statement), offers a feature to create such overviews.

To use (semantic) Wikis for process documentation (a special form of networked information) is described in
Using semantic Wiki Technology for collaborative Software Process Evolution - A light-weight approach to managing process documents ( http://www.wm-tagung.de/LSO2007/ ).