Wikitect
Wikitect is a small experimental wiki developed by Ward Cunningham as a pilot collaborative software architecture description tool. The work was done in support of the Eclipse Foundation's Architecture Council which did not request further development. The Eclipse Foundation has released the software under the EPL open source license.
We are now a small group that is exploring the applicability of the Wikitect tool for collaboration regarding large pattern languages with interest in applying those languages to some of the most vexing problems facing the world today.
Who We Are
This group was founded through correspondence facilitated by Eugene Eric Kim. We owe much to the intellectual inspiration of Christopher Alexander and the hard work of all his colleagues. The current admitted members are as follows.
We welcome additional members. We invite you to add your name to the bottom of this section along with a brief description of your interest. Please consider creating an account for this site and adding this page to your watch list. You can be notified of changes here by email if you select this option in your user preferences.
What We Do
Some of us speculate on the power of pattern languages to solve complex problems. Others are more interested in the mechanics of such pattern languages and the suitability of collaboration tools like wikitect to support their creation and distribution.
Dil has published some of his correspondence on his blog. See especially his first proposal.
We will explore the wikitect pilot's applicability by, perhaps, entering a well established pattern language. We expect there will be many ways to do this and many ideas for improving wikitect will emerge.
What We Have
We have the mostly hierarchical description of Eclipse prepared in 2006 as part of the pilot experiment. This can be browsed in a read-only mode here.
There is editable access to the same database here. This location is protected with login: GuestUser and a blank password. This is not a particularly good place to experiment with editing, but the editable interface offers a few extra functions such as dot and xml output and a source code preview.
We also have a hierarchical description of an automobile. This is a database that is designed for experimentation.