Wikis: user editable documents
A wiki is a free-form database that anyone is free to alter. Key characteristics of wikis are:
- Wikis are collections of linked pages which anyone can edit at any time -- they are a many to many medium
- A wiki on the Internet may be public or private
- Most wikis require one to log in to contribute so their entries can be tracked
- One can view the history of all revisions to a page
- One can revert a page back to a prior state
- Wiki pages have a comment section which is used to discuss or justify revisions to the page
Wikis are used by small groups, for example, members of a project team in a company, groups with common interests, for example, fans of a sports team, or they may be open to anyone on the Internet
When you edit a wiki page, you should always try to improve it. That can mean something as small as correcting a spelling error or something more significant like correcting a factual error or adding a section.
The most prominent example is the Wikipedia. Nearly everyone's first reaction to the Wikipedia is that it cannot possibly work, but the English language Wikipedia now has nearly 2 million articles, and there are a number of editions in other languages.
People are using Wikis in business, for example, for joint authoring of documents and managing projects.
Here are links to recordings of two thought-provoking talks on the Wikipedia given November 2005 at UC Berkeley:
Wikipedia articles may intentionally or unintentionally be inaccurate or incomplete.
The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham. He called the site WikiWikiWeb which was inspired by the word wiki meaning fast in the Hawaiian language. (Shuttle busses at the Honolulu airport are called wiki-wikis).