According to Wikipedia, as this manual is being written on 12/14/2004, a Wiki is "A Wiki or wiki .. is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows a user to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by anybody."
Cloud Wiki is an implemention of this concept, supporting the design principles laid down by the first commonly used wiki, C2, with a small set of additions and removals to allow Cloud Wiki to act as a first class member of the web. It is the stated goal of Cloud Wiki to be fast, succinct and functional for its users and easy to administer by its owners.
Cloud Wiki supports all the fundamental principles described by C2's wiki principles, with the notable exception of automatic link generation. Instead of automatically assuming that words in a node's content are links because of the word's aberrant casing (see "camel casing"), Cloud Wiki uses explicit free links; to delineate a link in your content, simply enclose a phrase with curly braces. It is the opinion of Cloud Wiki's developers that this is easier for English majors and other non-developers to stomach.
With the introduction of explicit links, it becomes rather simple to introduce remote links, links to web pages that are not contained in the wiki, and various matters of punctuation and capitalization return to being dictated by the content language, not the markup.