Understanding Wikis

The very first wiki (pronounced wee-kee) site, WikiWikiWeb, was created for the Portland Pattern Repository in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who devised a system that created Web pages quickly and allowed users to freely create and edit Web page content by using a Web browser. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick, and as Hawaiian words are doubled for emphasis, wikiwiki means very quick. WikiWikiWeb is the proper name of the concept, of which wiki or wikis are abbreviations.

A wiki Web site allows you to change any wiki page or create new pages, which is known as “open editing.” If a page is found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any user can edit it as they see fit. Therefore, as users share their information, knowledge, experience, ideas, and views, the content evolves. All users control and check the content because wikis rely on the assumption that most readers have good intentions. A wiki, therefore, provides collaborative and democratic use of Web sites. Wikis are purportedly more often used within companies than on the Internet, and common uses included intranets, project communication, and documentation.. A wiki enables users to work together to change or update information without the need to send e-mails or attend meetings or conference calls. One wiki implementation is Wikipedia from Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (http://www.wikipedia.org), which is an encyclopedia-like Web site that has inherited many of the nonencyclopedic properties of a wiki site.