Wiki

Introduction

A wiki (sometimes wikiwiki) is a website that allows anyone (with permission required or not, according to wikis) to edit any page and to add new pages. Wikis are unusually collaborative because all participants can, in the typical case, edit all, or nearly all, pages on a wiki. This is true of the best-known wiki, Wikipedia.

"Wiki" is the Hawaiian word meaning "quick," and as Hawaiians double words for emphasis, "wiki wiki" means "very quick." Ward Cunningham coined the term during his first visit to the Islands, when he was directed to a "Wiki Wiki" shuttle between airport terminals. Cunningham says, "Using the word doubling convention, I named the technology WikiWikiWeb." [1]

Wiki software is available in several variants, including MediaWiki and TWiki. It is now being widely used in business and educational institutions for both intranet and Internet applications, where it is recognized as a significant productivity tool.

What is special about wikis ?

Wikis have several characteristics that make them special compared to other kinds of Web sites.

Easily editable

Just a click on a button or a link is enough to allow a user to change the content of a wiki. This reduces drastically the distance between viewing a site and contributing to it.

Historization

All changes to a wiki page are memorized and kept in archives. One can view the previous versions, and sometimes compare two versions or restore an older one.

Easy creation of new pages

Wikis make it possible for users to easily create new pages, through a simple syntax.

No broken links

In a traditional wiki, there cannot be any broken link. If a user requests a page that does not actually exist, a form opens to invite him to bring content and create the page.

A posteriori moderation

Contrary to many other collaborative sites, wikis relie on the principle that users can create content that is moderated afterwards (if need be): no validation is requested before the content appears online.

Another way to look at site creation

The classical way of creating a site is to think of its structure first, then design it and bring the content. In a wiki, there is just a basic structure at the beginning, if any. Users then start bringing content and creating new pages and the wiki is being constructed step by step without a preliminary site plan. Gradually, the wiki structure evolves to become more usable, notably through reorganization (or "refactoring") of pages: deletion, merging, division of pages, etc.

History

Ward Cunningham invented the wiki concept and created the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, on March 25, 1995. [2] WikiWikiWeb, also called "Ward's Wiki," began life as a supplement to the Portland Pattern Repository.

Until 2001 or 2002, perhaps most wikis were general-purpose communities, with only very vague missions and an idiosyncratic set of rules and processes, in which they tended to emulate WikiWikiWeb.

Thus, shortly after Wikipedia got its start in 2001, when Cunningham was asked whether he thought wiki software could be used to create an encyclopedia, he replied, "Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki." [3] Whether Cunningham was correct is a matter of opinion. But regardless, Wikipedia did develop a different set of rules and processes, which spawned another set of wiki clones.

Issues and concerns about wikis

For all their benefits, wikis still raise some issues or at least concerns that are still debated among wiki users.

Vandalism

The most open wikis allow anyone to edit their pages, without even requesting to log in. In that case, changes that are made are quite anonymous: the only way to track who wrote what is through an IP address, which does not make it possible to identify the author of a change. This is still the way Wikipedia operates today, even though changes have been made in its policies to request log-in, in some cases. Anonimity can indeed be problematic in case of misbehavior. The danger here is often described as vandalism: an anomymous user can erase or alter the content of a page. Historization is a way to counter-balance this risk, since it is always possible to restore a previous version.

Trustfulness

Wikis can be used for several purposes, one of them being knowledge management. But the fact that edition can be anonymous (or through pseudonyms) raises the question of the trustfulness of information. To solve this issue, some wikis (just like Citizendium) request users to create an account and log in before they can edit pages. The use and verification of real names is another answer to the trustfulness issue.

Ergonomics

Wiki software, often referred to as wiki engines, lack uniformity in their syntax. They all have their own way to emphasize texts (bold, italics...), insert images, create links. The Wiki syntaxes request some training from users and Wysiwyg edition is not the common case. This makes it difficult for beginners to edit wikis and partly explains the gap between the number of wiki viewers and wiki editors.