Wiki and Blog integration is apparently a difficult thing. It seems that no one can really agree on how they should be integrated. There is also some question on if they should be integrated.
I stumbled across Blogs and Wiki: WhenBlogMeetsWiki (link now broken – see update below) while trying to find an app that had wiki and blog integration. This site (which is for a course at Bemidji State Univeristy) has a fairly good discussion on the differences and other attempts to combine blogs and wikis.
Now, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I would really like an app that does wiki and blog integration because there are many times when I would like to be able to reference a wiki (reference) page from a blog entry. It should be seamless integration without having to hack either code base to “force” it to work. I know there are a number of plugins available for most of the major wikis and blogs, but then you’re stuck with two seperate apps to manage. Both of which are probably more complex that what I’m looking for.
I like the model that Mediawiki uses where each individual wiki page has it’s own “talk” page. I like that idea but I don’t like how it’s implemented. I think it would make more sense for a wiki page to be able to have a blog of it’s own. That could be expanded on to give individual users their own blog within a wiki (the blog would be attached to their user page). In addition to a blog being able to be attached to a wiki page, there should also be a blog style comment ability. The thing I find most confusing about the wiki talk pages is that each user has to make sure they denote their words well. Sometimes you can get very confusing pages unless you’ve been following the “conversation” since day one. Maybe some form of “discussion” page would make more sense. With the ability to thread comments.
Anyhoo, I’m probably never going to find an app that does all of this so maybe it’s time for me to start working on one of my own. With the amount of free time I have these days, I should have a working prototype by 2010. ;)
I agree, it’s tricky to get wikis and blogs to work together.
I use drupal almost exclusively, and I found a nice module called Interwiki for it. It allows you to use square brackets in your blog posts to automatically link to wiki pages on various wikis. I’m not sure if something similar is availible for wordpress… but you could just switch to drupal anyway :)
Good luck with the blogging/wiki-ing!
Ryan