A DecoratorWiki is not a wiki which looks nice (perish the thought!), but rather one built to be part of the DecoratorPattern, as a decorator of another wiki (the 'basis' wiki). Essentially, each page consists of the appropriate page from the basis wiki (by TransClusion), followed by text specific to the decorator. It's a specialised form of WebAnnotation.

The motivation for this is to allow OnceAndOnlyOnce to apply across wikis; if i run a wiki for, say, cycling in LondonTown, i'm going to have a lot of general content on London, which would be redundant with that in the the OpenGuideToLondon, which would be bad. However, if i ran it as a DecoratorWiki, i could use the Open Guide as my basis, thus immediately taking advantage of all its content ForFree. Moreover, a lot of fact-oriented wikis could be based on Wikipedia; the scope of the latter is so broad that it will inevitably overlap with them.

Implementation details:

* The decorator should support decoration of pages which do not exist on the basis wiki, which would just contain text from the decorator; this is necessary because not everything that belongs on the decorator belongs on the basis (i'm sure the OpenGuideToLondon doesn't want to talk about HubVsDerailleurGears ...).
* There would probably have to separate edit links for the transcluded and decorating parts of each page, since they are separate chunks of text.
* The transclusion would have to happen on the server side, so that links in the text from the basis wiki could be pointed to pages on the decorator (the decorator is thus also acting as a proxy here).
* The decorator should have the same page naming and text formatting conventions as the basis, otherwise users are going to get confused.
* One might want some sort of MultipleInheritance, so my London cycling wiki could decorate the OpenGuideToLondon and some sort of general cycling wiki.

Does this sound like it would work?

With a dense enough web of decoration, you get some way towards an InterWiki.

CategoryWiki