Bolzano is a program for running a wiki. A wiki is a web site designed to encourage people to contribute to it. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, but there are many others. The first wiki, designed by Ward Cunningham, is still running at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki .
Bolzano is named after Bernard Bolzano, the early 19th century mathematician, philosopher and social reformer. He was an antimilitarist and a proponent of animal rights.
Bolzano’s mascot is this Grimpoteuthis octopus:
That’s a photo, not a cartoon!
The point of Bolzano is to illustrate what I think is about the right set of features for a wiki program to have.
Bolzano strikes the right balance (according to me) between features and complexity: enough features to get on with lots of collaborative communication, but not enough features to distract us while we’re trying to write. In this respect it’s very much like Ward Cunningham’s original wiki program, as opposed to impressive but relatively difficult to use wikis like MediaWiki (which runs Wikipedia).
Bolzano’s main features:
It formats its pages using HTML/CSS templates. In a future version of Bolzano, you will be able to edit these templates through the wiki itself. This means that a Bolzano page can look like almost anything, and more easily so than most (or even all?) other wikis.
Its markup language is simple, and hence easy to learn.
It uses Unicode for everything including page names, which makes it especially suitable for non-English languages. (This is not working perfectly yet.)
It saves a complete history of page changes in a compact human-readable format (not working yet).
Administrator Documentation
See administrator documentation.
Deliberate limitations
Most wikis allow you to write a link with a title that’s different from the page name or URL, so that, for example, you can replace a long URL with a single word.
Like the original wiki (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors), Bolzano disallows this. (That sentence makes a good example. In most wikis, you could abbreviate that link to something shorter, but in Bolzano you can’t.)
This restriction is completely deliberate, and it has a lot to do with what makes a wiki a wiki. A non-wiki web site should, ideally, look neat, and being able to give titles to links can help with that. But a wiki is different. A wiki, on the other hand, should be optimised for making writing as easy as possible. That means minimising decisions. So the name of a link is the link itself. Nothing to think about there. Move along.
One complication to this limitation is that it’s not actually enforced. Sometimes you really need to make these named links that I don’t like, and when you need to you can. See the full Markdown syntax at http://daringfireball.net/projects/Markdown/syntax.php to see how. But if you find you’re spending longer making your edits, then I’m going to say “I told you so”.
Bolzano uses only very simple programming techniques. For example, it keeps each page as a separate file on disk rather than in a database. This is deliberate. For the reasons for this, see Bolzano technical apologia.
If you insist on using a more powerful wiki despite my warning that doing so will cut your productivity, I recommend CloudWiki, which is slightly more powerful and the next best compromise in my opinion, or PmWiki, which is fairly easy to install and has oodles of features.