Wiki

Wiki

Explanation 1

A wiki is a Web site that allows users to add and update content on the site using their own Web browser. This is made possible by Wiki software that runs on the Web server. Wikis end up being created mainly by a collaborative effort of the site visitors. A great example of a large wiki is the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia in many languages that anyone can edit. The term “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian phrase, “wiki wiki,” which means “super fast.” I guess if you have thousands of users adding content to a Web site on a regular basis, the site could grow “super fast.”

 

Explanation 2

‘Wiki’ is one of the most prevalent buzzwords on the Internet, right up there with ‘cloud computing’ and ‘responsive design’. When you hear the word ‘wiki’, you most likely think immediately of Wikipedia, the famous online encyclopedia. More recently,WikiLeaks, the source of most leaked government secrets in recent years, has been grabbing headlines. With both sites bearing the weird root word, you would be forgiven for thinking they’re related. They’re not. At least not in the way you might think.

This term “wiki” actually means quick in Hawaiian. The journey from that definition to today’s definition of “a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users” is quite the interesting story, best told by Ward Cunningham, the father of the modern wiki.

The important part of wikis—what makes them different from any other type of website—is collaborative editing by the users. Think about that for a moment: the ability for the users of a wiki to collaboratively edit it. If you can read it, you can edit it. It seems simple at first, yet profoundly powerful in practice—and it is what both Wikipedia and WikiLeaks have in common.

That’s what we’re going to explore: the benefits a wiki can provide to a business, the sort of problems it can solve, and what sort of options you have for setting up a wiki for yourself. It’s a lot to cover, so let’s keep things moving.

What Wikis Do

To really appreciate what wikis in and of themselves do, we need to travel back in time, back to the original days of the web. By looking at what the first wiki was intended to do, the current state of wiki software will make a lot more sense.

I mentioned Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki, earlier. On the front page of his own wiki, he gives some insight into the origins of wikis and what they’re designed to do.

The idea of a “Wiki” may seem odd at first, but dive in, explore its links and it will soon seem familiar. “Wiki” is a composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration. We don’t know quite what it is, but we do know it’s a fun way to communicate asynchronously across the network.

I love that summary. In the beginning, Ward and his colleagues didn’t even know what wikis were supposed to do exactly. But they knew it was fun.

From that short summary we can pull out some of the main themes of wikis: composing, discussing, hyperlinking, collaborating, communicating.

Notice something about those words? They’re all verbs. They’re what wikis do.

Wiki