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For other uses, see Wiki (disambiguation).

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] <WICK-ee> or [ˈwiː.kiː] <WEE-kee>[1]) is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website (see wiki software), or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (and original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and the online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, is named after the "Wiki Wiki" line of Chance RT-52 buses in Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii. It was created in 1994 and installed on the web in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who also created the Portland Pattern Repository. "Wiki-wiki" means "hurry quick" in Hawaiian. It also refers to a type of native fish of the islands.

Typical site operations

A wiki (originally called Quickweb) is an editable website that does not require users to know HTML. Most have a system to record changes so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states. A wiki system may also include various tools, designed to provide users with an easy way to monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki as well as a place to discuss and resolve the many inevitable issues, namely, the inherent disagreement over wiki content. Wiki content can also be misleading, as users are bound to add incorrect information, whether intentionally or accidentally, to the wiki.

Many wikis will allow completely unrestricted access so that people are able to contribute to the site without necessarily having to undergo a process of 'registration', as had usually been required by various other types of interactive websites such as Internet forums or chat sites. Many users find this a very attractive alternative.

Key characteristics

A wiki enables documents to be written collectively in a extremely simple markup language using a web browser. A single page in a wiki is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire body of pages, which are usually highly interconnected via hyperlinks, is "the wiki"; in effect, a wiki is actually a very simple, easy-to-use user-maintained database for searching or even creating information.

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. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account. Sometimes session log-in is requested to acquire a "wiki-signature" cookie for autosigning edits. More private wiki servers require user authentication. Many edits, however, can be made in real-time, and appear almost instantaneously online. This can often lead to abuse of the system.

Pages and editing

The source format, sometimes known as "wikitext'", is augmented with a simplified markup language to indicate various structural and visual conventions. An often used example of one such convention is to start a line of text with an asterisk ("*") in order to mark it as an item in a bulleted list. Style and syntax can vary a great deal among implementations, some of which also allow HTML tags.

The reasoning behind this design is that HTML, with its many cryptic tags, is not especially human-readable. Making typical HTML source visible makes the actual text content very hard to read and edit for most users. It is therefore better to promote plain-text editing with a few simple conventions for structure and style.

It is also somewhat beneficial that users cannot directly use all the capabilities of HTML, such as JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets. Consistency in look and feel is also achieved: In many wiki implementations, an active hyperlink is exactly as it is shown, unlike in HTML where the invisible hyperlink can have an arbitrary visible anchor text. This goes along with some extra safety for the user: Permitting users to write in HTML might allow harmful or annoying code (for example, JavaScript code that prevents the reader from marking part of the text).

Wiki syntax (MediaWiki) Equivalent HTML Rendered output
"''Doctor''? No other title? A ''scholar''? And he rates above the civil authority?"

"Why, certainly," replied Hardin, amiably. "We are all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so much a world as a scientific foundation&mdash;under the direct control of the Emperor."

<p>

&quot;<em>Doctor</em>? No other title? A <em>scholar</em>? And he rates above the civil authority?&quot;
</p>
<p>
&quot;Why, certainly,&quot; replied Hardin, amiably. &quot;We're all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so much a world as a scientific foundation&mdash;under the direct control of the Emperor.&quot;
</p>

"Doctor? No other title? A scholar? And he rates above the civil authority?"

"Why, certainly," replied Hardin, amiably. "We're all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so much a world as a scientific foundation—under the direct control of the Emperor."

(Quotation above from Foundation by Isaac Asimov)

Some recent wiki engines use a different method: they allow "WYSIWYG" editing, usually by means of JavaScript or an ActiveX control that translates graphically entered formatting instructions, such as "bold" and "italics", into the corresponding HTML tags. In those implementations, the markup of a newly-edited HTML version of the page is generated and submitted to the server transparently, and the user is shielded from this technical detail. Users who do not have the necessary plugin can generally edit the page, usually by directly editing the raw HTML code. More recently, wiki engines are generating wiki syntax instead of HTML. This way, users who are comfortable editing in wiki syntax can carry on.

A Markup Standard

Although for years the de facto standard was the syntax of the original WikiWikiWeb, currently the formatting instructions vary depending on the wiki engine. Simple wikis allow only basic text formatting, whereas more complex ones have support for tables, images, formulas, or even interactive elements such as polls and games. Many people switch between wiki engines, from one to another. Because of the difficulty in using several syntaxes, many people are putting considerable effort into defining a wiki markup standard (see efforts by Meatball and TikiWiki).

Linking and creating pages

Wikis are a true hypertext medium, with non-linear navigational structures. Each page typically contains a large number of links to other pages. Hierarchical navigation pages often exist in larger wikis, often a consequence of the original page creation process, but they do not have to be used. Links are created using a specific syntax, the so-called "link pattern".

Originally, most wikis used CamelCase when naming program identifiers, produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word "CamelCase" is itself an example of CamelCase). 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". Note that 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.

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; indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. On Wikipedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia, the so-called "Go button" allows readers to view a page that matches the entered search criteria as closely as possible. The MetaWiki search engine was created to enable searches across multiple wikis. Search is keyword-based.

Server-side versus client-side wiki

By far, the most common wiki systems are server-side. In essence, the edit, display and control functions are provided on the server through the wikiengine that renders the content into a HTML-based page for display in a web browser.

A client-side wiki system only requires the server to "serve" wiki files in much the same way as a web server allows HTML files to be retrieved using HTTP. In this type of wiki system, all the execution required to convert the underlying wiki text into an onscreen formatted display page could reside in the client browser. Likewise, the editing tools and functionality reside with the browser.

The client-side wiki system parallels HTML in that the page becomes a rendering instruction for the browser to interpret. Client-side wiki systems may be little more than a code plugin to a more traditional web browser.

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 all the edits made within a given timeframe. Some wikis can filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts ("bots").

From the change log, other functions are accessible in most wikis: the Revision History showing previous page versions; and the diff feature, highlighting 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.

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.

Vandalism

The open philosophy of most wikis—of allowing anyone to edit content—does not ensure that editors are well intentioned. Wiki vandalism is a constant problem for wikis. Studies from IBM claim that most vandalism to Wikipedia is removed in 5 minutes or less. [1] However, in some cases it takes longer, as in the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy. In some cases, user accounts or IP addresses are banned from editing certain wikis, and certain pages may be 'locked', to prevent further vandalism.

The approach of making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage has been characterised as soft security.

History

The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki), is named after the "Wiki Wiki" line of "Chance RT-52 shuttle buses" in Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii by Ward Cunningham. Cunningham named WikiWikiWeb that way because he remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line 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." "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for "What I know is", which describes the knowledge contribution, storage and exchange function.

Development of Wiki

According to Cunningham, ideas of wiki can be traced back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, wikis were increasingly recognized as a promising way to develop private- and public-knowledge bases, and this potential inspired the founders of the Nupedia encyclopedia project, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, to use wiki technology as a basis for an electronic encyclopedia: Wikipedia was launched in January 2001; it originally was based upon UseMod software, but later switched to its own, open source codebase, now adopted by many other wikis. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in the enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets and documentation, initially for technical users. In December 2002, Socialtext launched the first commercial open source wiki solution. Open source wikis such as Wiki and Kwiki grew to over 1 million downloads on the Internets repository by 2004. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets. There is arguably greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public internet. However, this has not been yet proven. So, we must wait and see.

In 2005, the Los Angeles Times experimented with using a wiki in the editorial section of its web site. The Wikitorial project was soon shut down as vandals defaced it.

Wiki communities

Many wiki communities are private, particularly within enterprises as collaborative software. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. The democratic, all-encompassing nature of Wikipedia is a significant factor in its growth, while many other wikis are highly specialized. Today, the English-language Wikipedia is, by far, the world's largest wiki; the German-language Wikipedia is the second-largest, while the other Wikipedias fill many of the remaining upper slots. Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Wikitravel, World66 and Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base. The largest wikis are listed at meta:List of largest wikis (and a list from July 3, 2004 on Meatball: Biggest wikis). Many public wikis are listed at WikiIndex - a wiki of 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: TourBusStop. Domain names containing "wiki" are growing in popularity to support specific niches.

There exist WikiNodes — pages on wikis describing 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.

For those interested in creating their own wiki, there are many publicly available "wiki farms", some of which can also make private, password-protected wikis. JotSpot, OddWiki, PeanutButterWiki, SeedWiki, Socialtext, Wikia, and Wikispaces are seven such services; more at List of wiki farms.

Notes

  1. ^ according to Ward Cunningham

References

See also

Template:Link FA

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