OT assumes that the grammar of a natural language consists of a set of constraints, called Con, plus an ordering on these constraints. In many (but not all) versions of OT, it is assumed that Con is universal: the ranking is the only difference between languages.
There is as yet no agreement on the contents of Con. Furthermore, there is a lot of confusion in the literature about the orignal sources and formulation of many constraints. ConCat aims to build an encyclopedia of constraints which have been proposed, citing their original sources. ConCat assumes the form of a wiki: it can be freely edited by any interested party. All constraints are welcome; it is not our goal to present one particular view on constraints.
At present, we will still have to find out what is the best structure for an individual entry. There is one simple lemma, on Onset, as well as a few lemmas which have been created because they have some relevance for this lemma (Alignment, *Onset/x, HNuc). The references to OT literature each get their own separate page as well (e.g. Prince and Smolensky 1993).
How this works
At present, this wiki is running MoinMoin on a computational linguistics server at Indiana University. This seems okay for the time being, but one could discuss whether it would be better to have a dedicated web server (instead of Apache: CGI is rather inefficient) or a shorter address (although http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~concat redirects to this page), both of which are drawbacks that come from using a machine that is not primarily a web server.
In any case, this wiki will work like any other wiki: since people can change each other's work, it is impossible to guarantee correctness, or copyright. However, the wiki is set up in such a way that only people who have registered can add or change things. This will be a minimal protection against vandalism.
The MediaWiki User's Guide provides information on using the wiki software.
The very short history of Concat
The idea for this wiki came up during a discussion between Curt Rice (University of Tromsø, Norway) and Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens Institute, The Netherlands) during the PhonologyFest at Bloomington, Indiana (USA) in the summer of 2006.
There are two instances running, a MediaWiki one at XS4ALL, a commercial provider, and the MoinMoin one you are presently reading. The XS4ALL hosting is likely temporary, but the choice of MoinMoin over MediaWiki is based only on its possible extensibility with Python. This is still being investigated—Python scripts should allow plug-in customisation, like spell checking, and scripting, to provide some formal evaluation of constraints, for example.
Links
The English Wikipedia gives more information about Wiki, and about Optimality Theory.
The Rutgers Optimality Archive is the central archive for papers in OT.