Wiki

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The term wiki is pronounced wik' ee and comes from the Hawaiian language. In Hawaiian "wikiwiki" (sometimes "wiki wiki") means quickly. [1] Ward Cunningham visited Hawaii where he was first exposed to the term. He applied the term by naming his idea and created the first wiki in 1995. [2] Cunningham's book is available at wiki.org. [1] His idea was that a webpage could be modified by its readers, and the result of a reader's modification would immediately become the viewable page.

Through usage the term has shortened from wikiwiki, to wiki. A wiki is an internet website that uses hypertext to communicate its information. It uses software, including wiki software, to accomplish Mr. Cunningham's idea.

Contents

Characteristics of a Wiki

Mr. Cunningham's idea stemmed from "if a person can read the page then a person can modify the page with the same tools they read the page with". To accomplish this, a necessary wiki characteristic is that a reader be able to use the same tool they read a page with, to modify the page. A common web browser is used. To create or modify a page, today's wikis use a "What You See Is What You Get" approach. An easy to learn markup enhances a page's article by making terms appear <bold>bold</bold> and by linking one article to others. The result is an interconnected group of web pages that allow a reader to explore a wiki's articles to their interest and pace. But a reader can modify pages, too. Therefore, a wiki's pages are a collaboration of authorship.

Many of today's wikis can be modified by the reading public. But some problems have arisen as wikis have become popular. Some disgraceful modifications have happened on wide-open wikis that mis-present the subject. Other vandalism included opinionated edits (i.e. Bush is a beanbrain), or even false information placed into public view. Methods have been tried to insure a quality wiki, while likewise insuring the broadest possible user contribution. Some wikis require registration with the wiki web site before a reader can modify pages.

Controlling Users

While most wiki communities shun mandatory registration procedures, virtually all large wiki engines provide some way to restrict users who consistently violate community rules. Administrators of wikis can also ban a user from editing, which can be accomplished by banning their particular IP address or their username. Dial-up Internet Service Providers assign a new IP address for each login, though.

For smaller wikis, a common defense against a persistent "vandal" is to simply let them deface as many pages as they want to, and to then quickly revert the pages after the vandal has left. This tactic is often considered unacceptable in the context of larger communities, where a more stable editing environment is preferred, or where there may not be enough interest in reverting pages repeatedly.

To deal with the problem of changing IP addresses, self-expiring bans are sometimes used and extended to all IP addresses in a particular range, thereby ensuring that the vandal cannot edit pages within a given time frame.

As an emergency measure, some wikis allow switching the database to read-only mode, and some can allow only those users registered up to a cutoff date to continue editing. This may also be required during furious Edit wars. Generally speaking, however, any damage done by such vandalism can be reverted rather quickly. More problematic are the subtle errors inserted into pages which go undetected, or the man-hours required to monitor wikis, especially as they grow larger.

Controlling Content

Wikis generally follow a philosophy of making it easy to fix mistakes instead of making it hard to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they also provide various means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages, to index them, and sift through them.

The most prominent one on almost every wiki is the so-called "Recent changes" page. It is a list of recent edits. Some wikis allow filtering the list to exclude edits that have been marked "minor", and some made by automatic importing scripts, or "bots".

A diff from Wikipedia
highlighted changes between two revisions of a page
(Wikipedia diff shown)

From the change log, two other functions are accessible in most wikis: the revision history, which shows previous versions of the page, all saved inside the database, and the diff function, which displays the changes between two selected revisions. The revision history allows opening and saving a previous version of the page and thereby restoring the original content. The diff function can be used by an editor to decide whether this is necessary or not: An editor of the wiki can show the diff of a change listed on the "Recent changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, load the history to restore a previous revision. This process has become more-or-less streamlined, depending upon the wiki software used.

In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "Recent changes" page, some wikis provide additional controls over content. Wikipedia was the first wiki to introduce "watchlists", a form of internal bookmarking, used to generate a list of recent changes to a set of specific pages only. A watchlists is used by an editors to keep an eye on changes to articles of his choice. Wikipedia also allows highlighting links to pages which are below a given size, thereby making small pages, so-called "stubs", noticeable on all pages that link to them.

Many wikis allow the protecting of pages from being edited by regular users. Protected pages can only be edited by the administrators or specially empowered sysops, who can also remove the protection. This is generally considered to violate the basic philosophy of WikiWiki, but times have changed, and such protections, and others, may help the administration of a wiki without hindering the creation of its editors.

Using a wiki search

Most wikis offer at least a title search, if not a full text search. The scalability of the search depends highly on whether the wiki engine uses a database or not; the indexed access of a database is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. On some wikis, a "Go" button allows readers to directly view a page matching their search criteria, as closely as possible. To search several wikis at once, the MetaWiki search engine has been created.

Editing a wiki - Technical Issues of Markup and Editing

In traditional wikis, every page has two representations: the form in which it is displayed (usually HTML/XHTML versions, rendered by a web browser) and the form in which it is edited (a simplified markup language, the style and syntax of which varies from wiki to wiki, called "wikitext").

The reasoning behind this design is that (X)HTML, with its large library of nested tags, is too complicated to allow fast-paced editing, even by webpage coders, and its wide variation of appearence would distract from the uniformity of appearence wanted. It is also sometimes viewed as beneficial that users cannot use all the functionality that (X)HTML allows, such as JavaScript - though CSS is increasingly allowed or even promoted - because of the consistency in look and feel thereby enforced.

A wiki page therefore has two representation forms, the wiki syntax used by the user and saved by the wiki engine, and the (X)HTML rendered from the wikitext and sent to the user's browser, which in turn renders the formatted page.

wikitext syntax

(X)HTML

rendered output

You call '''this''' a ''website''?

You call <strong>this</strong> a <em>website</em>?

You call this a website?

Recent wiki engines provide "WYSIWYG" editing, usually requiring some ActiveX control or plugin that translates graphically entered formatting instructions like "bold" and "italics" into HTML tags that are then transparently submitted to the server. In these cases, users who do not have the necessary plugin can only edit the page in its HTML source.

The formatting instructions allowed by a wiki vary considerably depending on the wiki engine used. Simple wikis only allow basic text formatting, while more complex packages have support for tables, images, formulas, and even interactive elements, like polls or games. How much variation a wiki page will display is still evolving. Here is one of the efforts to define a Wiki Markup Standard.

Creating and Linking Pages

Creating a new page in a wiki is usually done through the same process as linking to it: a link is created on a topically related page; if the link does not exist, it is in some way emphasized as a "broken" link. Following that link opens an editor window, which then allows the user to begin entering text for the new page. This mechanism ensures that so-called "orphan" pages (which have no links pointing to them) are rarely created, and a generally high level of connectedness is retained. Wikinfo was the first to use XML importing to provide wikitext "starter" content from another wiki instead of displaying a blank page.

Wikis are a hypertext communication medium. The links that take a reader to another page of the wiki are created by people when they create or modify pages. Any wiki page typically contains a number of links to other pages.

History of wiki linking

Originally most wikis used CamelCase as a link pattern, 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 by their large number of links with names such as "TableOfContents" and "BeginnerQuestions".

CamelCase has many critics, and it was the switch of the largest of wikis, Wikipedia, to "free links", words which are put in [[double square brackets]], which then encouraged enhanced linking solutions and features. Various wiki engines use single brackets, curly brackets, underscores, slashes or other characters as a link pattern. Links across different wiki communities are possible using a special link pattern called InterWiki, in which each wiki keeps a list of other wikis and their URLs.

Wiki History

Wiki software originated in the design pattern community for writing pattern languages. The Portland Pattern Repository was the first wiki, established by Ward Cunningham in 1995 [2]. Cunningham invented and named the wiki concept, and produced the first implementation of a wiki engine. Some people maintain that only the original wiki should be called Wiki (upper case) or the WikiWikiWeb. Ward's Wiki remains one of the most popular Wiki sites.

In only a few years, by the turn of the 21st century, wikis were increasingly recognized as a promising technology to develop private and public knowledge bases and to collaborate on documents, and it was this potential which inspired the founders of the Nupedia encyclopedia project, Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger, to use wiki technology as a basis for an electronic encyclopedia: "Wikipedia" was launched in January 2001. It was originally based on the UseMod software, but later switched to its own open source codebase which has now been adopted by many other wikis. Wikinfo was inspired by Wikipedia, and GetWiki by Wikipedia's software, MediaWiki.

The English Wikipedia is still the world's largest and most controversial wiki, and the second largest wiki is Susning.nu, a Swedish language knowledge base, running the UseMod software. The all-encompassing aspirations of Wikipedians have been a significant factor in its growth, as well as in popularizing the wiki concept. Many wikis are highly specialized, though, and some take strident stands against what Wikipedia seems to have created.

Wiki Engines

Given the relative simplicity of the wiki concept, a large number of implementations exist, ranging from very simple "hacks" implementing only the very basic functionality to highly sophisticated content management systems. The majority of wiki engines are open source software. Large packages, like TWiki or MediaWiki, are developed collaboratively by many developers, while others, like GetWiki are created and maintained by one or two dedicated developers. Many wikis are highly modular, and provide APIs to allow programmers the development of new features without familiarity with the entire codebase.

It is unclear which wiki engines are most popular, though leading candidates would probably be UseMod, TWiki, or MoinMoin, due to the ease of setup. However, complex packages like MediaWiki have become popular, if overly complex, as well as MediaWiki's controversial fork, GetWiki, which received attention for its XML import feature and licensing. See Wiki software for a more complete listing of wiki engines.

WikiBus Tours

There are virtual guided "bus tours" taking visitors to various wiki sites. These consist simply of a page on each participating wiki, usually called "TourBusStop", which gives the link to the next bus stop. This is basically a type of web ring, or social ring of websites. Each bus stop page gives info about its wiki, and one can choose to explore that particular wiki (thus "getting off the bus"), or continue to the next wiki in the tour.

Wiki Communities

For other listings of communities:

Wiki-like Systems

Article References

  1. ^ "wikiwiki" - bottom of page
  2. ^ Free Online Dictionary - wiki

External Links

Author References

  • Aronsson, Lars (2002). Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website: Experience from susning.nu's first nine months in service. Paper presented at the 6th International ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, November 6 - 8, 2002, Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. [4]
  • Benkler, Yochai (2002). Coase's penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. The Yale Law Jounal. v.112, n.3, pp.369-446.
  • Cunningham, Ward and Leuf, Bo (2001). The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-71499-X.
  • Jansson, Kurt (2002). Wikipedia. Die Freie Enzyklopädie Lecture at the 19th Chaos Communications Congress (19C3), December 27, Berlin. Online description: [5]
  • Möller, Erik (2003). Loud and clear: How Internet media can work. Presentation at Open Cultures conference, June 5 - 6, Vienna. [6]
  • Möller, Erik (2003). Tanz der Gehirne. in Telepolis, May 9-30. Four parts: "Das Wiki-Prinzip", "Alle gegen Brockhaus", "Diderots Traumtagebuch", "Diesen Artikel bearbeiten". Summary and table of contents: [7]
  • Remy, Melanie (2002). Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Online Information Review. v.26, n.6, pp.434.

References

Retrieved from "http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Wiki"