A Novel Methodology Based on Formal Methods for Analysis and Verification of Wikis

A wiki is a collaborative Web site whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it. Wikis are becoming a new work tool in enterprises and are widely spreading everywhere. In fact, they are often used as internal documentation for various in-house systems and applications. Understanding and maintaining the structure of a wiki may be a crucial aspect. As well as software grows, decays and needs refactoring, the organic growth of a wiki inevitably leads to its degradation. We propose a novel methodology based on formal methods to analyse and verify the architecture of wikis. Formal verification helps to perform refactoring. Each wiki category, a set of wiki pages, is modelled using the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) process algebra in order to verify specific properties. First experiments conducted on a adequate number of categories of Wikipedia, assess the validity of our methodology revealing new directions for future research.