SisterSites
From RCC 2007
Wouldn't it be great if every page on a wiki linked to other wikis' pages on the same subject? That's what SisterSites is. It's one of many ways to link wikis closer together. For an example, scroll to the bottom of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WardCunningham and you'll see a row of icons which take you to Ward's home page on the wikis which are sisters of WardsWiki. If this wiki implemented SisterSites, then somewhere on this page you'd see an automatically generated list of links to the SisterSites pages of other wikis which were sisters of this conference wiki (likely candidates would include last year's wiki, the RoCoCo wiki, and WardsWiki).
A semi-official leaping-off point for the specification we're advocating for listing all of a wiki's pages is http://www.wikisym.org/wiki/index.php/WSR_1 (this makes it possible for wikis to see if they have matching pages on another wiki)
At last year's SisterSites session we coded that specification into six wikis. This year we'll share updates on what has happened since then (if anything), and code the spec - and the actual implementation of SisterSites links - into as many more wikis as we can.
Session notes:
Convenor: John Abbe Note-takers: John Abbe, Simon Koldyk Participants: Jake Elliott, Evan Prodromou, John Stanton, WardCunningham, Simon Koldyk, Dan Mendell, Carl Johnson, LionKimbro, RayKing
Explanation of what SisterSites is for those who don't know.
Evan has implemented http://sitemaps.org/ (aja/formerly Google sitemaps format) for WikiTravel.
Lion explains NearLinks - if a page doesn't exist in your site, links to it go to another site which does have that page.
Ray suggests you could do spidering and then you don't have to get the other sites to do anything. Ward wonders how much work wiki developers are willing to do to give eyeballs away to sites that won't even produce an easily-slurpible list of their page names.
WikiIndex could list whether a site has SisterSites
Brion Vibber has done some work on MediaWiki, coding a title index, and SisterSites link rendering. A little more work would finish it - see http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SisterSites/Once that's done, people usingMediaWiki software just need people to upgrade to the latest version. Evan will look at this with Ward's help and see what he can do.
John Abbe brought up the point that SisterSites could be developed also so that each user could choose on any wiki which sistersites they would want to use, that could be different from each other user. The LocalNames format could be extended for a user to specify their sisters in one place, which any wiki they use could then reference to know what SisterSites to link to.
See also
- http://2006.recentchangescamp.org/SisterSites2006
- http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SisterSitesImplementationGuide
- Ward's blog post on it: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4615 and PDF on implementing it: http://c2.com/doc/TipsForSisterSites/sisters.pdf
