A wiki ( / ˈ w ɪ k i / WIK-ee) is a website A website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path ('/') in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a that allows the easy[1] creation and editing of any number of interlinked In Wikipedia and some other Wikis, free links are used in Wikitext markup to produce internal links between pages, as opposed to the concept of CamelCase for the same purpose, which was used in the early days of Wikipedia, see CamelCase and Wikipedia web pages A web page or webpage is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device via a web browser A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to using a simplified markup language A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Examples are typesetting instructions or a WYSIWYG WYSIWYG , is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even the lighting for a theatrical event.[clarification needed] text editor.[2][3] Wikis are typically powered by wiki software Wiki software is software that runs a wiki, or a website that allows users to collaboratively create and edit web pages using a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including all current and previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wiki and are often used to create collaborative wiki websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking Categories: Notetaking software | Software comparisons | , in corporate intranets An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet Protocol technologies to securely share any part of an organization's information or network operating system within that organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network within an organization. Sometimes the term, and in knowledge management Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice systems.

Wikis may exist to serve a specific purpose, and in such cases, users use their editorial rights to remove material that is considered "off topic." Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales.[3] In contrast, open purpose wikis accept content without firm rules as to how the content should be organized.

Ward Cunningham Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched in 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first wiki software (it was later renamed "WikiBase");, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."[4] "Wiki" (pronounced [ˈwiti] or [ˈviti]) is a Hawaiian The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840 word for "fast".[5]

Contents

History

Main article: History of wikis Wiki Wiki Shuttle The Wiki Wiki Shuttle is a shuttle bus system at the Honolulu International Airport. Free shuttles run every 20 to 25 minutes between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, carrying people and baggage between three stations located in the departure gate area at Honolulu International Airport It is located three miles northwest of the city's central business district. Main roads leading to the airport are Nimitz Highway and the Queen Liliuokalani Freeway of Interstate H-1

WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki.[6] Ward Cunningham Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com) started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control on the Internet, based on the Domain Name System c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport It is located three miles northwest of the city's central business district. Main roads leading to the airport are Nimitz Highway and the Queen Liliuokalani Freeway of Interstate H-1 counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki The Wiki Wiki Shuttle is a shuttle bus system at the Honolulu International Airport. Free shuttles run every 20 to 25 minutes between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, carrying people and baggage between three stations located in the departure gate area" shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."[7][8]

Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written by Dan Winkler, a programming language for. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual "card stacks" supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm-viewer which is somewhat analogous to the structure of the World Wide Web. As Director ideas by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text."[3][9]

In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet Protocol technologies to securely share any part of an organization's information or network operating system within that organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network within an organization. Sometimes the term, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning. There may be greater use of wikis behind firewalls A firewall is a part of a computer system or network that is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications. It is a device or set of devices which is configured to permit or deny computer applications based upon a set of rules and other criteria than on the public Internet.

On March 15, 2007, wiki entered the online Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is a dictionary of the English language. Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. As of December 2008[update], the editors had completed one quarter of a third edition.[10] Some people claim "Wiki" also stands for "What I Know Is"[11] but this is a false backronym.[7]

Characteristics

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be and removed. (December 2009)

Ward Cunningham, and co-author Bo Leuf Bo Arne Leuf, born July 9, 1952. He is the author of the book The Wiki Way , written in collaboration with WikiWiki inventor Ward Cunningham. His book Peer To Peer (2002) discusses different P2P solutions both from a technical and legal point of view, in their book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham is a book about the WikiWiki collaborative editing system, such as that used on Wikipedia. Ward Cunningham is the creator of the original Wiki software . The book is about how to install/customize/manage wiki systems, followed by a perspective on the nature of wiki-style described the essence of the Wiki concept as follows:

A wiki enables documents to be written collaboratively, in a simple markup language A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Examples are typesetting instructions using a web browser A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to. A single page in a wiki website is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically[citation needed]. The reference points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. Such text is usually viewed with a computer. A software system for viewing and, is "the wiki". A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.[12]

A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Many wikis are open to alteration by the general public without requiring them to register user accounts In computing, a user is a person who uses a computer or Internet service. A user may have a user account that identifies the user by a username , screen name (also screenname), or "handle", which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term. To log in to an account, a user is typically required to authenticate himself/herself/. Sometimes logging in for a session is recommended, to create a "wiki-signature" cookie for signing edits automatically. Many edits, however, can be made in real-time and appear almost instantly online. This can facilitate abuse of the system. Private wiki servers require user authentication Authentication is the act of establishing or confirming something (or someone) as authentic, that is, that claims made by or about the subject are true ("authentification" is a French language variant of this word). This might involve confirming the identity of a person, tracing the origins of an artifact, ensuring that a product is what to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them.

Boulous et al write that it is the "openness of wikis that gives rise to the concept of 'Darwikinism', which is a concept that describes the 'socially Darwinian process' that wiki pages are subject to. Basically, because of the openness and rapidity that wiki pages can be edited, the pages undergo an evolutionary selection process not unlike that which nature subjects to living organisms. 'Unfit' sentences and sections are ruthlessly culled, edited and replaced if they are not considered 'fit', which hopefully results in the evolution of a higher quality and more relevant page. Whilst such openness may invite 'vandalism' and the posting of untrue information, this same openness also makes it possible to rapidly correct or restore a 'quality' wiki page."[13]

Editing wiki pages

There are many different ways in which wikis have users edit the content. Ordinarily, the structure and formatting of wiki pages are specified with a simplified markup language A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Examples are typesetting instructions, sometimes known as "wikitext Wikitext language or wiki markup is a lightweight markup language used to write pages in wiki websites, such as Wikipedia, and is a simplified alternative/intermediate to HTML. Its ultimate purpose is to be converted by wiki software into HTML, which in turn is served to web browsers". For example, starting a line of text with an asterisk ("*") is often used to enter it in a bulleted list. The style and syntax of wikitexts can vary greatly among wiki implementations, some of which also allow HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms tags. The reason for taking this approach is that HTML, with its many cryptic tags, is not very legible, making it hard to edit. Wikis therefore favour plain text editing, with fewer and simpler conventions than HTML, for indicating style and structure. Although limiting access to HTML and cascading style sheets Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL (CSS) of wikis limits user ability to alter the structure and formatting of wiki content, there are some benefits. Limited access to CSS promotes consistency in the look and feel In software design, look and feel is a term used in respect of a graphical user interface and comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces , as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes, and menus (the "feel"). The term can also refer to aspects of an API, mostly and having JavaScript JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. It can be characterized as a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is also considered a functional disabled prevents a user from implementing code, which may limit access for other users.

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application developed by and used on all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as on many other wiki websites worldwide. It is written in the PHP programming language with a backend database syntax Equivalent HTML Rendered output
"Take some more [[tea]]," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take ''less''," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take ''more'' than nothing." <p>"Take some more <a href="/wiki/Tea" title="Tea">tea</a>," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.</p>

<p>"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more."</p> <p>"You mean you can't take <i>less</i>," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take <i>more</i> than nothing."</p>

 "Take some more tea Tea is the agricultural product of the leaves, leaf buds, and internodes of the Camellia sinensis plant, prepared and cured by various methods. "Tea" also refers to the aromatic beverage prepared from the cured leaves by combination with hot or boiling water, and is the common name for the Camellia sinensis plant itself," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

(Quotation above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll . It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends. The tale by Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (/ˈkærəl/, KA-rəl), was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and ")

Increasingly, wikis are making "WYSIWYG WYSIWYG , is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even the lighting for a theatrical event.[clarification needed]" ("What You See Is What You Get") editing available to users, usually by means of JavaScript JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. It can be characterized as a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is also considered a functional or an ActiveX ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality control that translates graphically entered formatting instructions, such as "bold" and "italics", into the corresponding HTML tags An HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text. HTML elements represent semantics, or meaning. For example, the title element or wikitext. In those implementations, the markup of a newly edited, marked-up version of the page is generated and submitted to the server transparently, and the user is shielded from this technical detail. However, WYSIWYG controls do not always provide all of the features available in wikitext, and some users prefer not to use a WYSIWYG editor, and as a result many of these sites offer some means to edit the wikitext directly.

Most wikis keep a record of changes made to wiki pages; often every version of the page is stored. This means that authors can revert to an older version of the page, should it be necessary because a mistake has been made or the page has been vandalized. Many implementations (for example MediaWiki MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application developed by and used on all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as on many other wiki websites worldwide. It is written in the PHP programming language with a backend database) allow users to supply an "edit summary" when they edit a page. This is a short piece of text (usually one line) summarizing the changes. It is not inserted into the article, but is stored along with that revision of the page, allowing users to explain what has been done and why; this is similar to a log message when committing changes to a revision control Revision control, also known as version control, source control or software configuration management , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files. Changes are usually identified by a number or system.

Navigation

Within the text of most pages there are usually a large number of hypertext links to other pages. This form of non-linear navigation is more "native" to wiki than structured/formalized navigation schemes. That said, users can also create any number of index or table of contents pages, with hierarchical categorization or whatever form of organization they like. These may be challenging to maintain by hand, as multiple authors create and delete pages in an ad hoc manner. Wikis generally provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages.

Most wikis have a backlink feature, which displays all pages that link to a given page.

It is typical in a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the wiki.

Linking and creating pages

Links are created using a specific syntax, the so-called "link pattern" (also see CURIE). Originally, most wikis used CamelCase to name pages and create links. These are produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word "CamelCase" is itself an example). While CamelCase makes linking very easy, it also leads to links which are written in a form that deviates from the standard spelling. CamelCase-based wikis are instantly recognizable because they have many links with names such as "TableOfContents" and "BeginnerQuestions." It is possible for a wiki to render the visible anchor for such links "pretty" by reinserting spaces, and possibly also reverting to lower case. However, this reprocessing of the link to improve the readability of the anchor is limited by the loss of capitalization information caused by CamelCase reversal. For example, "RichardWagner" should be rendered as "Richard Wagner," whereas "PopularMusic" should be rendered as "popular music". There is no easy way to determine which capital letters should remain capitalized. As a result, many wikis now have "free linking" using brackets, and some disable CamelCase by default.

Trust and security

Controlling changes

History comparison reports highlight the changes between two revisions of a page.

Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is the "Recent Changes" page—a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.[14] Some wikis can filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts ("bots").[15]

From the change log, other functions are accessible in most wikis: the revision history shows previous page versions and the diff feature highlights the changes between two revisions. Using the revision history, an editor can view and restore a previous version of the article. The diff feature can be used to decide whether or not this is necessary. A regular wiki user can view the diff of an edit listed on the "Recent Changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, consult the history, restoring a previous revision; this process is more or less streamlined, depending on the wiki software used.[16]

In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "recent changes" page, some wiki engines provide additional content control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly.[17] A watchlist is a common implementation of this.

Some wikis also implement "patrolled revisions," in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark some edits as not vandalism. A "flagged revisions" system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed.[18]

Searching

Most wikis offer at least a title search, and sometimes a full-text search. The scalability of the search depends on whether the wiki engine uses a database. Some wikis, such as PMWiki, use flat files.[19] MediaWiki's first versions used flat files, but it was rewritten by Lee Daniel Crocker in the early 2000 to be a database application. Indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. Alternatively, external search engines such as Google can sometimes be used on wikis with limited searching functions in order to obtain more precise results. However, a search engine's indexes can be very out of date (days, weeks or months) for many websites.

Software architecture

Wiki software is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system, allowing web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. It is usually implemented as an application server that runs on one or more web servers. The content is stored in a file system, and changes to the content are stored in a relational database management system. Alternatively, personal wikis run as a standalone application on a single computer. For example: WikidPad.

Trustworthiness

Critics of publicly editable wiki systems argue that these systems could be easily tampered with, while proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content and correct it.[3] Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows:

“ Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a Web site that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well.[6] ”

High editorial standards in medicine have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis.[20] Some wikis allow one to link to specific versions of articles, which has been useful to the scientific community, in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles, improve them and provide links to the trusted version of that article.[21]

Noveck points out that "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation." On controversial topics that have been subject to disruptive editing, a wiki may restrict editing to registered users.[22]

Security

The open philosophy of most wikis, allowing anyone to edit content, does not ensure that every editor is well-meaning. Vandalism can be a major problem. In larger wiki sites, such as those run by the Wikimedia Foundation, vandalism can go unnoticed for a period of time. Wikis by their very nature are susceptible to intentional disruption, known as "trolling". Wikis tend to take a soft security[23] approach to the problem of vandalism; making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage. Larger wikis often employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism and JavaScript enhancements that show characters that have been added in each edit. In this way vandalism can be limited to just "minor vandalism" or "sneaky vandalism", where the characters added/eliminated are so few that bots do not identify them and users do not pay much attention to them.

The amount of vandalism a wiki receives depends on how open the wiki is. For instance, some wikis allow unregistered users, identified by their IP addresses, to edit content, whilst others limit this function to just registered users. Most wikis allow anonymous editing without an account,[24] but give registered users additional editing functions; on most wikis, becoming a registered user is a short and simple process. Some wikis require an additional waiting period before gaining access to certain tools. For example, on the English Wikipedia, registered users can only rename pages if their account is at least four days old. Other wikis such as the Portuguese Wikipedia use an editing requirement instead of a time requirement, granting extra tools after the user has made a certain number of edits to prove their trustworthiness and usefulness as an editor. Basically, "closed up" wikis are more secure and reliable but grow slowly, whilst more open wikis grow at a steady rate but result in being an easy target for vandalism. A clear example of this would be that of Wikipedia and Citizendium. The first is extremely open, allowing anyone with a computer and internet access to edit it, making it grow rapidly, whilst the latter requires the users' real name and a biography of themselves, affecting the growth of the wiki but creating an almost "vandalism-free" ambiance.

Malware can also be problem, as users can add links to sites hosting malicious code. For example, a German Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm was edited to include a hyperlink to a website that would infect the user's computer.[12] A countermeasure is the use of software that prevents users from saving an edit that contains a link to a site listed on a blacklist of malware sites.[25]

Edit wars can also occur as users repetitively revert a page to the version they favor. Some wiki software allows an administrator to stop such edit wars by locking a page from further editing until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate.[12]

Some wikis are in a better position than others to control behavior due to governance structures existing outside the wiki. For instance, a college teacher can create incentives for students to behave themselves on a class wiki he administers, by limiting editing to logged-in users and pointing out that all contributions can be traced back to the contributors. Bad behavior can then be dealt with in accordance with university policies.[19]

Communities

User communities

Many wiki communities are private, particularly within enterprises. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to help produce software documentation.[26] A study of corporate wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.[27] In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.[28]

Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries.[29] In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work.[30] In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend amongst industries toward collaboration was placing a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.[12]

Wikis have found some use within the legal profession, and within government. Examples include the Central Intelligence Agency's Intellipedia, designed to share and collect intelligence, dKospedia, which was used by the American Civil Liberties Union to assist with review of documents pertaining to internment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay; and the wiki of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, used to post court rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The United States Patent Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. Cornell Law School founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called Wex, whose growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit.[22]

There also exist WikiNodes which are pages on wikis that describe related wikis. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor wiki is simply a wiki that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate wiki is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.

One way of finding a wiki on a specific subject is to follow the wiki-node network from wiki to wiki; another is to take a Wiki "bus tour", for example: Wikipedia's Tour Bus Stop. Domain names containing "wiki" are growing in popularity to support specific niches.

For those interested in creating their own wiki, there are publicly available "wiki farms", some of which can also make private, password-protected wikis. PBwiki, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and Wikia are popular examples of such services. For more information, see List of wiki farms. Note that free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page.

The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are reader, author, wiki administrator and web administrator. The web administrator is responsible for installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. The wiki administrator maintains wiki content and is provided additional functions pertaining to pages (e.g. page protection and deletion), and can adjust users' access rights by, for instance, blocking them from editing.[31]

The English-language Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web[32] and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.[33] Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Memory Alpha, Wikitravel, World66 and Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base.

Medical and health-related wiki examples include the Flu Wiki, which is intended to help local public health communities prepare for, and perhaps cope, with a possible avian influenza pandemic, and Ganfyd, an online collaborative medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts.[13]

A study of several hundred wikis showed that a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth; that access controls restricting editing to registered users tends to reduce growth; that a lack of such access controls tends to fuel new user registration; and that higher administration ratios (i.e. admins/user) have no significant effect on content or population growth.[34]

Research communities

Wikis are an active topic of research. Two well-known wiki conferences are

Rules

Wikis typically have a set of rules governing user behavior. Wikipedia, for instance, has an intricate set of policies and guidelines summed up in its five pillars: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; Wikipedia has a neutral point of view; Wikipedia is free content; Wikipedians should interact in a respectful and civil manner; and Wikipedia does not have firm rules. Many wikis have adopted a set of commandments. For instance, Conservapedia commands, among other things, that its editors use "B.C." rather than "B.C.E." when referring to years prior to the common era and refrain from "unproductive activity."[35] One teacher instituted a commandment for the class wiki, "Wiki unto others as you would have them wiki unto you."[19]

Legal environment

Joint authorship of articles, in which different users participate in correcting, editing, and compiling the finished product, can also cause editors to become tenants in common of the copyright, making it impossible to republish without the permission of all co-owners, some of whose identities may be unknown due to pseudonymous or anonymous editing.[12] However, where persons contribute to a collective work such as an encyclopedia, there is no joint ownership if the contributions are separate and distinguishable.[36] Despite most wikis' tracking of individual contributions, the action of contributing to a wiki page is still arguably one of jointly correcting, editing, or compiling which would give rise to joint ownership.

Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an open content license. Version 2 of the GNU Free Documentation License includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing; Creative Commons licenses are also popular. When no license is specified, an implied license to read and add content to a wiki may be deemed to exist on the grounds of business necessity and the inherent nature of a wiki, although the legal basis for such an implied license may not exist in all circumstances.

Wikis and their users can be held liable for certain activities that occur on the wiki. If a wiki owner displays indifference and forgoes control (such as banning copyright infringers) that he could have exercised to stop copyright infringement, he may be deemed to have authorized infringement, especially if the wiki is primarily used to infringe copyrights or obtains direct financial benefit, such as advertising revenue, from infringing activities.[12] In the United States, wikis may benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects sites that engage in "Good Samaritan" policing of harmful material, with no requirement on the quality or quantity of such self-policing.[37] However, it has also been argued that a wiki's enforcement of certain rules, such as anti-bias, verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no-original-research policies, could pose legal risks.[38] When defamation occurs on a wiki, theoretically all users of the wiki can be held liable, because any of them had the ability to remove or amend the defamatory material from the "publication." It remains to be seen whether wikis will be regarded as more akin to an internet service provider, which is generally not held liable due to its lack of control over publications' contents, than a publisher.[12]

It has been recommended that trademark owners monitor what information is presented about their trademarks on wikis, since courts may use such content as evidence pertaining to public perceptions. Jarvis notes, "Once misinformation is identified, the trade mark owner can simply edit the entry."[39]

See also

Wikiversity has learning materials about Wiki

References

  1. ^ Mitchell, Scott (July, 2008), Easy Wiki Hosting, Scott Hanselman's blog, and Snagging Screens, MSDN Magazine, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc700339.aspx, retrieved 2010-03-09
  2. ^ Dictionary.oed.com, Oxford English Dictionary (draft entry, March 2007) Requires Paid Subscription
  3. ^ a b c d wiki, 1, London: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc, 2007, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192819/wiki, retrieved 2008-04-10
  4. ^ Cunningham, Ward (2002-06-27), What is a Wiki, WikiWikiWeb, http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki, retrieved 2008-04-10
  5. ^ "Hawaiian Words; Hawaiian to English". mauimapp.com. http://www.mauimapp.com/moolelo/hwnwdshw.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-19.
  6. ^ a b (Ebersbach 2008, p. 10)
  7. ^ a b Cunningham, Ward (2003-11-01), Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki, WikiWikiWeb, http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html, retrieved 2007-03-09
  8. ^ Cunningham, Ward (2008-02-25), Wiki History, WikiWikiWeb, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory, retrieved 2007-03-09
  9. ^ Cunningham, Ward (2007-07-26), Wiki Wiki Hyper Card, WikiWikiWeb, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiHyperCard, retrieved 2007-03-09
  10. ^ Diamond, Graeme (2007-03-01), March 2007 new words, OED, Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/news/newwords.html, retrieved 2007-03-16
  11. ^ "The wiki principle". Economist.com. April 20, 2006. http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=6794228. Retrieved 2010-07-22.
  12. ^ a b MNK Boulos, I Maramba, S Wheeler (2006), "Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education", BMC medical education (BMC Medical Education) 6: 41, doi:10.1186/1472-6920-6-41, PMID 16911779, PMC 1564136, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41/
  13. ^ (Ebersbach 2008, p. 20)
  14. ^ (Ebersbach 2008, p. 54)
  15. ^ (Ebersbach 2008, p. 178)
  16. ^ (Ebersbach 2008, p. 109)
  17. ^ Goldman, Eric, Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences, 8, Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law
  18. ^ a b c Naomi Augar, Ruth Raitman and Wanlei Zhou (2004), Teaching and learning online with wikis, Beyond the comfort zone, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.1456&rep=rep1&type=pdf
  19. ^ Barsky, Eugene; Giustini, Dean (2007-12), Introducing Web 2.0: wikis for health librarians, Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, https://dspace.library.ubc.ca/handle/2429/497
  20. ^ Kevin Yager (16 March 2006), Wiki ware could harness the Internet for science, Nature, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7082/full/440278a.html
  21. ^ a b Noveck, Beth Simone, Wikipedia and the Future of Legal Education, 57, Journal of Legal Education
  22. ^ Soft Security, UseModWiki, 2006-09-20, http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SoftSecurity, retrieved 2007-03-09
  23. ^ (Ebersbach 2008, p. 108)
  24. ^ Meta.wikimeda.org
  25. ^ C Müller, L Birn (September 6–8, 2006), Wikis for Collaborative Software Documentation, Proceedings of I-KNOW ’06, http://i-know.tugraz.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/47_wikis-for-collaborative-software-documentation.pdf
  26. ^ A Majchrzak, C Wagner, D Yates (2006), Corporate wiki users: results of a survey, Symposium on Wikis, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1149472
  27. ^ Email is so five minutes ago, Business Week Online, November 28, 2005
  28. ^ MM Wanderley, D Birnbaum, J Malloch (2006), New Interfaces For Musical Expression, IRCAM — Centre Pompidou, ISBN 2-84426-314-3, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142215.1142259
  29. ^ Nancy T. Lombardo (June 2008), Putting Wikis to Work in Libraries, 27, Medical Reference Services Quarterly, pp. 129–145, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a901841555&db=all
  30. ^ Cubric, Marija (2007), Analysis of the use of Wiki-based collaborations in enhancing student learning, University of Hertfordshire, https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2299/3672
  31. ^ WikiStats by S23, S23Wiki, 2008-04-03, http://s23.org/wikistats/largest_html.php?sort=users_desc&th=8000&lines=500, retrieved 2007-04-07
  32. ^ Alexa Web Search – Top 500, Alexa Internet, http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none, retrieved 2008-04-15
  33. ^ C Roth, D Taraborelli, N Gilbert (2008), Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis, The Centre for Research in Social Simulation, http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=cress
  34. ^ "Conservapedia.com". Conservapedia.com. 2010-05-15. http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Commandments. Retrieved 2010-07-24.
  35. ^ Redwood Music Ltd v. B Feldman & Co Ltd, RPC 385 .
  36. ^ Kathleen M. Walsh & Sarah Oh (23 February 2010), Self-Regulation: How Wikipedia Leverages User-Generated Quality Control Under Section 230, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=sarah_oh
  37. ^ Myers, Ken (2008), Wikimmunity: Fitting the Communications Decency Act to Wikipedia, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society
  38. ^ Jarvis, Joshua (May 2008), Police your marks in a wiki world, Managing Intellectual Property

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: wiki
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Wikis
Types Personal · Bliki · Semantic · Enterprise · Peer-to-peer · Mobile · Wiki farm
Components Software · Wikitext · Interwiki links
Lists Wikis · Software
Comparisons Software · Wiki farms
See also History of wikis · Creole
Computer-mediated communication
Online chat · Online discussion · Communication software · Collaborative software · Social network service
Asynchronous conferencing E-mail · Electronic mailing list · FidoNet · Usenet · Internet forum · Shoutbox · Bulletin Board System
Synchronous conferencing Data conferencing · Instant messaging · Internet Relay Chat · LAN messenger · Talker · Videoconferencing · Voice chat · VoIP · Web chat · Web conferencing
Publishing Blog · Wiki

Categories: Human-computer interaction | Hypertext | Internet history | Self-organization | Social information processing

 

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