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Wiki 101
Jan 2004Imagine a public park with a wall set aside for mural artists. Anyone could show up at any time and start painting, adding to existing images, filling blank space, or whitewashing as much as they like. A wiki is an analogous public space, but it's on the web.
Wiki Basics
Essentially a wiki is a set of web pages editable by anyone. No special knowledge of HTML is needed. Nor is it necessary to access a web server to upload pages. Every page in a wiki can be amended, edited, or even deleted by anyone with a web browser.
From a user's perspective, the mechanics are simple. Typically each page will have a set of links to
- Switch from a View mode to an Edit mode, or vice versa
- Show the revision history of the current page
- Jump to the wiki's home page
- Search the full text of all pages in the wiki
- Display help on how to edit in the wiki
It's the Edit link that makes a wiki special. Click on that and you'll see the core content of the current page redisplayed in your browser, but now it's inside an editable text form. Common characters are used to represent the page's special formatting, e.g., a line starting with an exclamation point is a heading, while a group of lines starting with dashes is an unnumbered list. The markup conventions vary between wiki implementations, but they're generally simple and have some mnemonic value. In any case, you can modify the text area to your heart's content and then submit your changes. You're instantly back in the View mode, and your changes are live.
A few additional features help make wikis more interesting and useful. You can link to another page in the wiki by inserting the page's title, enclosed in asterisks (or another symbol, depending on the wiki implementation). If the title isn't in the wiki, you'll still get a link, but it goes to a new, blank page in the wiki, ready for you to add content. Also, many wiki implementations allow you to upload or attach files to any page, enabling ad hoc file storage.
Wikis in Practice
As you might imagine, wikis offer both the best and worst features of collaborative environments. There's remarkable user-friendliness and flexibility for contributors, but those same characteristics can lead to a chaotic free-for-all of content and commentary. Lets look at some specifics.
Security
There is none! As noted, anyone can participate. Of course, you can restrict that by hosting a wiki on an intranet. Really Strategies is experimenting with a wiki on our company intranet, as a potential repository for project documents. So our pool of contributors is a small group of employees with specific goals for the wiki.
Structure
Wikis make hyperlinking easy, and they enforce link integrity. But as each user cross-references his or her contribution with other pages, you can get an expanding "cloud" of pages, with no overarching organizing principal or navigational structure.
Community
As in the mural analogy, the value of the result depends on the community of contributors and their reasons for contributing. A community that actively maintains the wiki will find it useful, which can in turn generate the enthusiasm to keep it focused and fresh.
See For Yourself
Perhaps the best known wiki is the Wikipedia, a multilingual web encyclopedia maintained by anyone who cares to contribute. I just visited and found a page in the literature section listing authors alphabetically by name. But contributions in this area are lacking, so I took a moment to add Umberto Eco as the first "E" name. I made his name a hyperlink to a new page, so feel free to visit the site and add his biography or bibliography.
Roll Your Own Wiki
I've been experimenting with a free wiki implementation called Swiki, short for Squeak-Wiki. It was developed in Squeak, a cross-platform environment for the Smalltalk programming language. Installation on a Windows PC was no harder than downloading Squeak to my desktop, then dragging the Swiki startup file onto the Squeak icon. It starts a local Squeak web server, so I was creating a test site and adding new pages via my web browser in a matter of minutes.
A more advanced commercial offering is ProjectForum, which is billed as multipurpose project work-center, with possibilities for managing — among other things — assignments, document history (via attachments), meeting notes, announcements, discussions, and customer interactions.
The Wiki Engines site lists numerous wiki variations. This list is part of a wiki, so if you find new software, go right ahead and add it.
Further Reading
- The Wiki Way by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham. The bible of wiki design and use.
- WikiWikiWeb. The self-billed "first and best" Wiki. This is a great place to get a feel for wiki structure while reading about wikis, wiki history, related collaborative environments, and — if you dig deep enough — where the name "wiki" originated.
