Artificial Intelligence times 3

Hello Subscriber

A quarter of the new year has already passed, and artificial intelligence continues to keep us busy. In this issue, it appears not just once but three times.

As always, we’re here to help with any questions using our own kind of intelligence 😉.

Your CosmoCode DokuWiki Team

AI‑Assisted Editing

Editing a wiki page is actually easy, yet many users still hesitate to jump in. A request we hear often is: “Couldn’t we just leave comments instead?”. That approach sounds tempting, but we usually advise against it. When important information becomes outdated and the right details are buried among many comments, a wiki quickly loses its value.
One of our partners came up with a great idea. Why not create a system that feels like a comment feature but actually keeps the content up to date? The result: highlight part of the text, leave a short note, and a language model (LLM) automatically updates that section based on your feedback. As simple as a comment, but with the benefit of real content improvement.

Together with our partner, we developed a plugin based on this concept, tested it, and now offer it as an early‑access version for our Business Partners.

AIAgent – The Next Step After AIChat

AI agents represent the latest stage in artificial intelligence. Instead of answering a single question, a language model receives a task and a list of tools it can use. The model decides on its own which tools to apply and works until it reaches a result. This gives it a kind of agency - turning it into an agent.

While developing our AI‑assisted editing plugin, our team asked whether this concept could also work with our chat functionality. The answer was yes, and that led to the new AIAgent Plugin.

Its interface looks familiar to users of the AIChat plugin, but a lot more is happening under the hood. The AIAgent has two modes: Chat and Edit. In Chat Mode, it behaves as you would expect: ask questions and get answers from the wiki, including semantic search. But the agent can also read pages, list namespaces, or check tables of contents on its own. In Edit Mode, the AI assistant can add or update page content directly while you chat with it.

The new plugin is more flexible in its configuration, too. You can assign different models to different modes, adjust parameters such as reasoning levels for modern models, or create your own modes with custom prompts and tools. All DokuWiki API endpoints can be used as tools, including those of other plugins.

You’ll find a detailed description in the documentation on DokuWiki.org. The plugin is currently available in early access for our business plugin partners.

With AIAgent, we’re introducing the next generation of our AI plugins. AIChat and AIEditor will remain for now - AIChat for knowledge dialogues and AIEditor for targeted edits. In the future, our main development focus will shift to AIAgent, which combines the best of both worlds. The particularly accessible interface of AIEditor might even serve as an alternative entry point to AIAgent later on.

Defending Against AI Bots

LLMs open up entirely new ways to interact with a wiki but also bring new challenges.

Training large language models requires huge amounts of text. To collect it, AI labs large and small automatically crawl the web. Unfortunately, some ignore established standards like robots.txt.

The result can be a surge in server load and traffic until the wiki becomes almost unreachable for regular visitors. Some of these bots use thousands of IP addresses at once, effectively acting like a DDoS attack.

DokuWiki lead developer and CosmoCode team member Andreas Gohr has experienced these problems himself and introduced two possible solutions:

If you need similar protection mechanisms for a wiki or another website, we’ll be happy to help you implement them.

Other Updates

Our website recently received a technical upgrade, and if everything’s working as planned, you won’t notice a thing. Behind the scenes, we’ve moved from Grav CMS to Astro. The static‑site approach fits perfectly with our developer‑focused way of managing content. Of course, we didn’t stop at the standard setup - we extended Astro and customized it to fit our workflow.

A wiki isn’t an Excel spreadsheet, and it shouldn’t be. Still, sometimes it’s useful to perform small calculations within DokuWiki tables. DokuWiki user Sherry Wheeler created the AV Math Table plugin to make that possible.