Instead, we need to be able to capture the “living language” as it is currently used, in a way that can be updated easily as our understanding of design changes and grows. The author does not intend here that design terminology can or should be prescriptively set. However, for design researchers to communicate effectively, there must exist some way to describe key concepts and terms. The language that we use to describe it must also evolve. Design is an evolving, growing discipline.
In this section, the author will describe four design research projects that he is developing that use Xiki. While one might think that these incidents are frequent in a system as open as a Wiki, experience has shown that this rarely happens. This lets a user community quickly undo mistakes or malicious attempts to destroy Xiki contents.
Anyone who can browse a page can also display the revision history anyone who can edit a topic page can also revert the page back to a previous version. Every time that a user saves changes to a page, Xiki uses RCS to register the changes. Xiki also supports revision control via the RCS system typically available on Unix/Linux platforms and freely available for other platforms. Only the site administrator can define a user group, with the form \group\AGroup This form prevents user FredFlintstone from deleting the current page. Authentication is based on listing particular actions that can be done by users and user groups. FAS in the author’s case) that will be rendered as a “signature” (this is another unique feature of Xiki). They will be able to use a special syntactic form (e.g. Authenticated users will be able to customise the behaviour of Xiki to their own preferences. FilSalustri for the author) and a home page in the People web. Users registering on Xiki will be assigned a WikiWord user name (e.g.
However, by July 2005, registration will be implemented and anyone will be allowed to register. As of this writing, Xiki is still not open to other users because it is still quite immature.
In the author’s view, authentication helps to ensure that contributors take responsibility for their content and get proper attribution of their contributions. While the author agrees with the principle of openness, it does not follow that editing should be unauthenticated.