Version control your text via Wikis

If you’re someone who needs to make sure that your documents have consistency and that edits are tracked, you need version control. There are different ways to go about it. If your main concern is content, a wiki might be something you’d find useful. You could track changes of your ideas, your notes, your recipes via wikis that you could install from the repositories or you could download them from the internet. Fortunately, Linux package managers easily show us a listing of the various wikis we could install.

What are wikis?

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Source: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

Though in our case, we could do that on our computers, not necessarily going online. It would depend on what wiki software you’d like to install. Anyhow, there are a lot of PHP-based wikis out there so it’s more or less required for you to have Apache and PHP installed. Some wikis don’t really require a database backend so it’s not always a necessity to install MySQL.

Example: Dokuwiki
Dokuwiki is a nice wiki, if you ask me, because it’s simple to use. There’s not much trouble installing it because the instructions are straightforward. If you’re on Ubuntu, there’s a Dokuwiki package. So it’s a quick apt-get install.

Using Dokuwiki
Once you have Dokuwiki up and running, you could start on the Start page. You could begin by editing that page with a click on the “Edit this page” button. You could could create new pages by creating links to them even if they don’t exist yet. On Dokuwiki, you could indicate that a text is a link by enclosing the text in double square brackets like this: [[New Page]]
They will be created when you click on the link and add text to it.

As for tracking changes, just click on the “Recent Changes” button and you will see the “diff” or the difference between versions. Sounds neat, right?

Tomorrow, I’d blog about version control of files.