Introduction
This page describes an approach to creating and maintaining scope-specific terminology glossaries using GitHub wikis. This approach is being developed by the Concepts and Terminology WG (CTWG) to satisfy the need for any ToIP-related glossary community—any group forming a community of interest or a community of practice—to have an easy, human-friendly way to document and manage the terms they need to share in order to communicate effectively both within their community and outside of it.
The Basic Idea of a Glossary Wiki
This definition of a wiki is from the best know wiki in the world, Wikipedia:
A wiki (/ˈwɪki/ (
listen) WIK-ee) is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
The basic idea of a glossary wiki is simply a wiki whose scope is a specific set of terms defined by a specific glossary community that, taken together, form a glossary for that community.
Why GitHub?
There are several reasons the CTWG chose GitHub to host our glossary wiki capability:
- GitHub is the standard back-end repository system used by Linux Foundation projects (of which the ToIP Foundation is one).
- GitHub has a built-in wiki capability called using GitHub wikis that can be turned on for any GitHub repo.
- 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.
- 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.