mbvan.org is built on DokuWiki, a widely used implementation of the wiki technology. DokuWiki is an open source project led by Andreas Gohr of Berlin. He heads up a small team of primary developers and a wider community of DokuWiki users who contribute bits and pieces, bug fixes, and add-ons called plugins. Among the latter is the Discussion plugin, which is the basis for the discussion section of mbvan.org.1)
A wiki, in its most unrestrictive form, lets visitors to a site edit, add content, and create new pages for new topics. The most widely used wiki of this sort is Wikipedia. But wikis can also be used as content management systems, that is, as the means to organize and deliver the content of a web site to its visitors. It's in this way that mbvan.org uses DokuWiki. Many wikis stand somewhere in between the unrestricted formats such as Wikipedia and Content Management Systems. Cityscapes, a project of my own, is something like this.
There is an underlying philosophy to wikis: they enable communities, and for this reason alone it seemed appropriate to set the new incarnation of mbvan.org inside a wiki. It was originally a community, it is still rooted in community, and the wiki form gives it the potential to implement future community features.