Terms Wikis are the mechanism that the CTWG recommends for working groups, task forces, and other initiatives to manage terms and their definitions. They help you make glossaries, whitepapers, governance frameworks, and other artifacts that use words and ideas with precision.

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Introduction

Terms are words or phrases that label formally defined concepts. You can words or phrases that act as labels for formally defined concepts. "MRI" is a medical term. "Habeas corpus" is a legal term... Any time a group of experts invents or standarizes, terms and their definitions are an important tool as well as a work product.

We could manage terms in lots of ways – everything from writing them down on post-it notes to putting them in a spreadsheet to buying recording them in fancy professional terminology software. You databases. Here at TOIP, we want something cheap and easy, with minimal setup and minimal learning curve – right? But you'd also like to be able to be able to learning curve. Yet we want some fanciness, too – the ability to formally release and version your glossaries, and a way to see how terms are related, and cite a way to attribute sources, and a way to reference terms from other places, too...

We think you want something cheap and easy, with minimal setup and minimal learning curve. We can give you that, while still providing some very sophisticated features that you might eventually need. To do it, we need to teach you about how to create and maintain a special type of wiki. Don't worry – it's easy.

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Our answer to this tension is terms wikis. These are simple websites that allow collaborative editing in a browser. They meets the "easy and cheap" criteria, but allows some sophisticated features under the hood. Think Google Docs, but with slightly more structure – or Wikipedia, but a whole lot simpler. You can learn how to use them in 5 minutes.

A terms wiki is owned by a any community of interest or a community of practice that needs precise alignment about its mental models and the words that describe them. In TOIP, these groups typically correspond to working groups or task forces. Sometimes one group undertakes multiple projects, and each is worthy of its own set of terms. Whenever a set of terms is internally cohesive and managed by a crisply delineated set of stakeholders, we call the context in which it lives a scope. Each scope needs its own terms wiki.

How to use them

1. Create a terms wiki for your group
2. (Nicky's suggestion: workflow))
3. How to start a new glossary wiki for your glossary community. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
4. Understanding the template for a glossary wiki page. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
5. How to insert links into glossary wiki pages (or any document you write). <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
6. How your glossary wiki works with the CTWG ToIP Term tool. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
7. <insert additional glossary wiki documentation pages here>

Directory of Glossary Wikis Maintained Directly by the CTWG

1. ctwg-terms is the CTWG's own glossary wiki, i.e., for the terms we use to describe "the terminology of terminology".
2. toip-general-terms is the glossary wiki for terms in general use across the whole of the ToIP community writ large.

Directory of Other Glossary Wikis

Listings are alphabetical order.

Why A Wiki?

This definition of a wiki is from the best know wiki in the world, Wikipedia:

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1. GitHub is the standard back-end repository system used by Linux Foundation projects (of which the ToIP Foundation is one).
2. GitHub has a built-in wiki capability called using GitHub wikis that can be turned on for any GitHub repo.
3. A GitHub repo—and its inherent access control capabilities—provides a standard, widely accessible open source tool for each glossary community to manage its own glossary wiki.
4. A GitHub wiki is stored in Markdown documents in GitHub just like all other GitHub documentation and can be accessed and managed programmatically via the GitHub APIs.
5. The CTWG is developing tooling, called the ToIP Term tool—that will be able to automatically ingest the contents of glossary wikis that follow the CTWG glossary wiki guidelines into a shared terminology corpus. This is where the CTWG and the participating glossary communities can add value by mapping terms and concepts across different glossary communities in order to increase the overall communication value of the terms to everyone.

Directory of Glossary Wiki Documentation Pages

To avoid confusion, the CTWG maintains documentation describing glossary wikis on this wiki (the main Confluence wiki that serves the entire ToIP Foundation). The current available documentation includes:

1. (Nicky's suggestion: workflow))
2. How to start a new glossary wiki for your glossary community. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
3. Understanding the template for a glossary wiki page. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
4. How to insert links into glossary wiki pages (or any document you write). <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
5. How your glossary wiki works with the CTWG ToIP Term tool. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
6. <insert additional glossary wiki documentation pages here>

Directory of Glossary Wikis Maintained Directly by the CTWG

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1. ctwg-terms is the CTWG's own glossary wiki, i.e., for the terms we use to describe "the terminology of terminology".
2. toip-general-terms is the glossary wiki for terms in general use across the whole of the ToIP community writ large.

Directory of Other Glossary Wikis

Listings are alphabetical order.

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