Contents 1 In the Beginning 2 The Catalyst 3 The Project 4 The Release

[edit] In the Beginning

After the Case Blog system came online circa December of 2004, the developers and administrators of that system in the Middleware Engineering Group of ITS began to think about sister projects that would complement and enhance the blogging system. A wiki seemed like a natural supplement. Upon further ruminations of a possible wiki project, those engineers began to think that a wiki, by and of itself, would be useful tool to provide to our end users.

Proposals were born.

The proposals sat uninitiated as other projects absorbed most of the members' time and the priority of the wiki project was set lower and lower day after day.

[edit] The Catalyst

On May 24th of 2005, a meeting between Professor Youngjin Yoo and Jeremy Smith concerning possible uses of the Case blogging system for a class Professor Yoo was teaching in the Fall semester of 2005, yielded new life into the Wiki project. He wanted a system that could be used by the students to collaboratively create and define a vocabularly of information for a class he was teaching on mobile technology. A shuffling of the priorities of the other projects and the addition of the student employee Greg Szorc into the Middleware Engineering Group resulted in the earnest beginnings of the grand Wiki@Case development.

[edit] The Project

The requirements for what was wanted out of the wiki systems were thorough. Revision control; authentication via our Single Sign On service; authorization via Directory Server groupings; heavy use of Syndicated Feeds like per-contributor feeds, per-category feeds, and wiki-wide feeds; database storage of content; editable templates; etc. The following pieces of Wiki software were evaluated in some fashion or another:

• Kwiki
• Twiki
• DocuWiki
• MoinMoin
• PhpWiki
• coWiki
• and, MediaWiki

MediaWiki was the final one chosen to bring to Beta implementation. It fit nearly all of the requirements, and on the requirements where it fell a bit short, the source code was modified or plugins were developed to tailor it accordingly. But, the biggest factor was scaling, MediaWiki is field tested to scale to thousands of users.

Greg was the lead developer with oversight and project management by Jeremy Smith. Steve Cook, IT Application Architect for the College of Arts & Sciences, created the initial templates used by the system.

The skin was subsequently changed because of the limitations a fixed-width skin has. This new skin was designed in conjunction with Heidi Cool.

[edit] The Release

The Case Wiki was first announced to be open for Beta on Greg and Jeremy's respective blogs here and here. The official announcement of the Case Wiki came on June 15, 2005 via a post on the Case ITS home page. Since then, ongoing changes to the service as it is adapted are tracked on CaseWiki:Changes. The Case Wiki became a production service on March 27, 2006.