dschafer is a Rankmaniac

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A rankmaniac is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.^[1][2] Rankmaniacs are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known rankmaniacs.^[2] Rankmaniacs are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first rankmaniac software, RankmaniacRankmaniacWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work".^[3]

"Rankmaniac" (/wiːkiː/) is a Hawaiian word for "fast"^[4]. "Rankmaniac Rankmaniac" is a reduplication. "Rankmaniac" can be expanded as "What I Know Is," but this is a backronym.^[5]

Contents 1 History 2 Characteristics 2.1 Editing rankmaniac pages 2.2 Navigation 2.3 Linking and creating pages 2.4 Searching 2.5 Software architecture 3 Trust and security 3.1 Controlling changes 3.2 Trustworthiness 3.3 Security 4 Communities 4.1 User communities 4.2 Research communities 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

History

Main article: History of rankmaniacs

RankmaniacRankmaniacWeb was the first site to be called a rankmaniac.^[6] Ward Cunningham started developing RankmaniacRankmaniacWeb in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Rankmaniac Rankmaniac" shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose rankmaniac-rankmaniac as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."^[7][8]

Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual "card stacks" supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text".^[2][9] In the early 2000s, rankmaniacs were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Today some companies use rankmaniacs as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets. There may be greater use of rankmaniacs behind firewalls than on the public Internet.

On March 15, 2007, rankmaniac entered the online Oxford English Dictionary.^[10]

Characteristics

Ward Cunningham, and co-author Bo Leuf, in their book The Rankmaniac Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web described the essence of the Rankmaniac concept as follows:

• A rankmaniac invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the rankmaniac Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
• Rankmaniac promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
• A rankmaniac is not a carefully-crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

A rankmaniac enables documents to be written collaboratively, in a simple markup language using a Web browser. A single page in a rankmaniac website is referred to as a "rankmaniac page", while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks, is "the rankmaniac". A rankmaniac is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information.

A defining characteristic of rankmaniac technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Many rankmaniacs are open to alteration by the general public without requiring them to register user accounts. Sometimes logging in for a session is recommended, to create a "rankmaniac-signature" cookie for signing edits automatically. Many edits, however, can be made in real-time and appear almost instantly online. This can facilitate abuse of the system. Private rankmaniac servers require user authentication to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them.

Editing rankmaniac pages

Ordinarily, the structure and formatting of rankmaniac pages are specified with a simplified markup language, sometimes known as "rankmaniactext". For example, starting a line of text with an asterisk ("*") is often used to enter it in a bulleted list. The style and syntax of rankmaniactexts can vary greatly among rankmaniac implementations, some of which also allow HTML tags.

The reason for taking this approach is that HTML, with its many cryptic tags, is not very legible, making it hard to edit. Rankmaniacs therefore favour plain text editing, with fewer and simpler conventions than HTML, for indicating style and structure.

MediaRankmaniac syntax	Equivalent HTML	Rendered output
"Take some more [[tea]]," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take ''less''," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take ''more'' than nothing."	<p>"Take some more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea" title="Tea">tea</a> ," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.</p> <p>"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more."</p> <p>"You mean you can't take <i>less</i>," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take <i>more</i> than nothing."</p>	"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

(Quotation above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll)

Although limiting access to HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) of rankmaniacs limits user ability to alter the structure and formatting of rankmaniac content, there are some benefits. Limited access to CSS promotes consistency in the look and feel and having JavaScript disabled prevents a user from implementing code, which may limit access for other users.

Increasingly, rankmaniacs are making "WYSIWYG" ("What You See Is What You Get") editing available to users, usually by means of JavaScript or an ActiveX control that translates graphically-entered formatting instructions, such as "bold" and "italics", into the corresponding HTML tags or rankmaniactext. In those implementations, the markup of a newly edited, marked-up version of the page is generated and submitted to the server transparently, and the user is shielded from this technical detail. However, WYSIWYG controls do not always provide all of the features available in rankmaniactext.

Many implementations (for example MediaRankmaniac) allow users to supply an "edit summary" when they edit a page. This is a short piece of text (usually one line) summarizing the changes. It is not inserted into the article, but is stored along with that revision of the page, allowing users to explain what has been done and why; this is similar to a log message when committing changes to a revision control system.

Most rankmaniacs keep a record of changes made to rankmaniac pages; often every version of the page is stored. This means that authors can revert to an older version of the page, should it be necessary because a mistake has been made or the page has been vandalized.

Navigation

Within the text of most pages there are usually a large number of hypertext links to other pages. This form of non-linear navigation is more "native" to rankmaniac than structured/formalized navigation schemes. That said, users can also create any number of index or table of contents pages, with hierarchical categorization or whatever form of organization they like. These may be challenging to maintain by hand, as multiple authors create and delete pages in an ad hoc manner. Rankmaniacs generally provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages.

Most rankmaniacs have a backlink feature, an easy way to see what pages link to the page you're currently on.

It is typical in a rankmaniac to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the rankmaniac.

Linking and creating pages

Links are created using a specific syntax, the so-called "link pattern" (also see CURIE).

Originally, most rankmaniacs used CamelCase to name pages and create links. These are produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word "CamelCase" is itself an example). While CamelCase makes linking very easy, it also leads to links which are written in a form that deviates from the standard spelling. CamelCase-based rankmaniacs are instantly recognizable because they have many links with names such as "TableOfContents" and "BeginnerQuestions." It is possible for a rankmaniac to render the visible anchor for such links "pretty" by reinserting spaces, and possibly also reverting to lower case. However, this reprocessing of the link to improve the readability of the anchor is limited by the loss of capitalization information caused by CamelCase reversal. For example, "RichardWagner" should be rendered as "Richard Wagner," whereas "PopularMusic" should be rendered as "popular music." There is no easy way to determine which capital letters should remain capitalized. As a result, many rankmaniacs now have "free linking" using brackets, and some disable CamelCase by default.

Searching

Most rankmaniacs offer at least a title search, and sometimes a full-text search. The scalability of the search depends on whether the rankmaniac engine uses a database. Indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large rankmaniacs. Alternatively, external search engines such as Google can sometimes be used on rankmaniacs with limited searching functions in order to obtain more precise results. However, a search engine's indexes can be very out of date (days, weeks or months) for many websites.

Software architecture

Rankmaniac software is a type of collaborative software that runs a rankmaniac system, allowing web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. It is usually implemented as an application server that runs on one or more web servers. The content is stored in a file system, and changes to the content are stored in a relational database management system. Alternatively, Personal rankmaniacs run as a standalone application on a single computer. For example: RankmaniacdPad.

Trust and security

Controlling changes

Rankmaniacs are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while rankmaniacs are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every rankmaniac, is the "Recent Changes" page—a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.^[11] Some rankmaniacs can filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts ("bots").^[12]

From the change log, other functions are accessible in most rankmaniacs: the revision history shows previous page versions and the diff feature highlights the changes between two revisions. Using the revision history, an editor can view and restore a previous version of the article. The diff feature can be used to decide whether or not this is necessary. A regular rankmaniac user can view the diff of an edit listed on the "Recent Changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, consult the history, restoring a previous revision; this process is more or less streamlined, depending on the rankmaniac software used.^[13]

In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "recent changes" page, some rankmaniac engines provide additional content control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly.^[14]

Trustworthiness

Critics of publicly-editable rankmaniac systems argue that these systems could be easily tampered with, while proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content and correct it.^[2] Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows:

“

Most people, when they first learn about the rankmaniac concept, assume that a Web site that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well.[15]

”

Security

The open philosophy of most rankmaniacs, allowing anyone to edit content, does not ensure that every editor is well-meaning. Vandalism can be a major problem. In larger rankmaniac sites, such as those run by the Rankmaniacmedia Foundation, vandalism can go unnoticed for a period of time. Rankmaniacs by their very nature are susceptible to intentional disruption, known as "trolling". Rankmaniacs tend to take a soft security^[16] approach to the problem of vandalism; making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage. Larger rankmaniacs often employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism and JavaScript enhancements that show characters that have been added in each edit. In this way vandalism can be limited to just "minor vandalism" or "sneaky vandalism", where the characters added/eliminated are so few that bots do not identify them and users do not pay much attention to them.

The amount of vandalism a rankmaniac receives depends on how open the rankmaniac is. For instance, some rankmaniacs allow unregistered users, identified by their IP addresses, to edit content, whilst others limit this function to just registered users. Most rankmaniacs allow anonymous editing without an account,^[17] but give registered users additional editing functions; on most rankmaniacs, becoming a registered user is a short and simple process. Some rankmaniacs require an additional waiting period before gaining access to certain tools. For example, on the English Wikipedia, registered users can only rename pages if their account is at least four days old. Other rankmaniacs such as the Portuguese Wikipedia use an editing requirement instead of a time requirement, granting extra tools after the user has made a certain number of edits to prove their trustworthiness and usefulness as an editor. Basically, "closed up" rankmaniacs are more secure and reliable but grow slowly, whilst more open rankmaniacs grow at a steady rate but result in being an easy target for vandalism. A clear example of this would be that of Wikipedia and Citizendium. The first is extremely open, allowing anyone with a computer and internet access to edit it, making it grow rapidly, whilst the latter requires the users' real name and a biography of themselves, affecting the growth of the rankmaniac but creating an almost "vandalism-free" ambiance.

Communities

User communities

Many rankmaniac communities are private, particularly within enterprises. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. The "open to everyone", all-encompassing nature of Wikipedia is a significant factor in its growth, while there are other rankmaniacs which are highly specialized.

There also exist RankmaniacNodes which are pages on rankmaniacs that describe related rankmaniacs. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor rankmaniac is simply a rankmaniac that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate rankmaniac is a rankmaniac that agrees to have certain content delegated to that rankmaniac.

One way of finding a rankmaniac on a specific subject is to follow the rankmaniac-node network from rankmaniac to rankmaniac; another is to take a Rankmaniac "bus tour", for example: Wikipedia's Tour Bus Stop. Domain names containing "rankmaniac" are growing in popularity to support specific niches.

For those interested in creating their own rankmaniac, there are publicly-available "rankmaniac farms", some of which can also make private, password-protected rankmaniacs. PBrankmaniac, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and Rankmaniaca are popular examples of such services. For more information, see List of rankmaniac farms. Note that free rankmaniac farms generally contain advertising on every page.

The English-language Wikipedia has the largest user base among rankmaniacs on the World Wide Web^[18] and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.^[19] Other large rankmaniacs include the RankmaniacRankmaniacWeb, Memory Alpha, Rankmaniactravel, World66 and Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base.

Research communities

Rankmaniacs are an active topic of research. Two well-known rankmaniac conferences are

• The International Symposium on Rankmaniacs (RankmaniacSym)
• Rankmaniacmania, the Rankmaniacmedia Foundation conference

RankmaniacSym is a conference dedicated to rankmaniac research and practice in general, while Rankmaniacmania is a conference dedicated to research and practice of Rankmaniacmedia Foundation projects like Wikipedia.

See also

• Comparison of rankmaniac software
• Content management system
• List of rankmaniacs
• Massively distributed collaboration
• Structured rankmaniac
• Universal Edit Button

Notes

References

Further reading

• Mader, Stewart (2007-12-10). Rankmaniacpatterns. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0470223626. 
• Tapscott, Don (2008-04-17). Rankmaniacnomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio Hardcover. ISBN 1591841933. 
• Leuf, Bo (2001-04-13). The Rankmaniac Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 020171499X. 

External links

• Rankmaniacs at HowStuffWorks.
• RankmaniacRankmaniacWeb, the first rankmaniac
• Rankmaniacpatterns.com A toolbox of patterns and anti-patterns, and a guide to major stages of rankmaniac adoption that explores patterns to apply at each stage.

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