History of the Wiki
Of the many types of “social computing” tools available, you may have had heard of the “wiki.” Ward Cunningham, who devised the wiki, named it using a word from the Hawaiian language. "Wikiwiki" is a stative verb meaning "fast, speedy; to hurry, hasten; quick, fast, swift.
A wiki is formally-defined as a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web "pages", a hypertext system for storing and modifying information - a database, where each page is easily editable by any user with a forms-capable Web browser client.
Conceptually, wiki software is the "the simplest online database that could possibly work.” It allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself. Wiki supports an arbitrary, changeable, "directed network" or “hypertext” organization of its content. It encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by non-technical users.
The wiki navigational model is simple. Editing content is "just a click a way" using a simple markup language. Potentially anyone in the world can change anything - or change it back – and it provides fast retrieval. The implications of this model are:
- There are many, mutable entry points to the text stored in the wiki, including a history-of-changes list.
- It allows flexible restructuring of links between pages to reflect new relationships.
- It facilitates multithreaded, nonlinear discussions between the many wiki users.
- It features ease of writing and ease of collaboration.
Advantages of Working with Wikis
The advantage to a wiki is that it is a fast, simple way for a community of people to work together on writing project. The disadvantage to public wiki sites is a lack of editorial control; wiki vandalism (in the form of wiki spam and wiki hijacking) is common. Security features have been added to modern wiki software to prevent abuse, but this can dampen discourse, too. For this reason there are probably more internal wikis, on a corporate intranet and behind a firewall, than there are public wikis.
More about Wikis
Additional Resources
The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web.