WikiPing

WikiPing is an open standard for broadcasting changes made in a wiki and publish them on remote servers. The name derives from ping, the famous tool used on the internet to test whether a particular host is reachable on the network.

Basics

Using the WikiPing protocol, a Wiki can act as a client that sends an XML-RPC request (called a "remote procedure call") for every change made in the Wiki to a central server which stores the requests in a database, displays them in chronological order on a web site and publishes an RSS feed with the same data.

The WikiPing protocol was inspired by the weblogUpdates.ping introduced by http://weblogs.com; the server uses the received data to compile a kind of "global recentchanges" list similar to those lists most Wikis provide in a local scope.

While the webpage with the "global recentchanges" list can be read directly by humans, the RSS feed produced with the same data can be used by a news aggregator and thus published on other websites, or used by individuals with their desktop news readers to keep track of changes in participating Wikis.

pecifications

Unlike the weblogs.com specs a WikiPing request needs named parameters (which are called "structs" in the XML-RPC specification) because most of the fields are optional and thus need to be identified.

WikiPing servers accept the following fields:

* tag (required) the name (or title) of the page which has been changed
* URL (required) the URL assigned to that page
* wiki (required) the wiki on which the page is hosted
* interwikiname (optional)
* history (optional) an URL pointing to the revision-list (page history) of the page
* author (optional) name of the editor who performed the change
* authorpage (optional) wikipage of the author.
* changelog (optional) some wikis provide a textfield in which the author can drop a short note that describes what kind of changes have been made.
* language (optional) two letter code (ISO 639-1) of the used language.
* callback (optional) URL of the clients rpc-interface. The presence of this field indicates the capability of the client to serve rpc calls itself. The WikiPing server can "callback" and request additional information to the WikiPing client.

Ideally, WikiPing clients should avoid sending pings to a WikiPing server for minor edits and SandBox changes, so the aggregated results aren't "polluted" with irrelevant changes.

upport

The WikiPing client functionality is currently supported by the following wiki engines:
* WikkaWiki
* [http://comawiki.org/ ComaWiki]
* MindWikiIt can be easily implemented in any WakkaWiki-fork as well as in other wiki engines.

ee also

* Wiki
* WikiEngine
* News aggregator

External links

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20050216161632/http://recentchanges.net/WikiPing WikiPing standard specification]