Wikis - Build Your Own Web Your Way
A wiki is an open, collaborative website, where anyone who has access to it can contribute to it. The first wiki was created by software engineer Ward Cunningham in 1995. He wanted to create "the simplest database that would work", for software developers. He chose the word "wiki" for the name of his database because "wiki" is the Hawaiian for "quick" or "hurry." Think of a wiki as a simple documentation system in which the content may be stored in a database, or as files. An open wiki allows potentially anyone on the World Wide Web to edit it, but some wilkis restrict editing priviliges to a closed group of users. A wiki can be edited online in a Web browser, and it can be edited in plain text.
The largest and best-know wiki is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia used by millions of people every day. Wikipedia says there are currently 1,375,837 articles in the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia alone has over 511 million words, more than ten times as many as the next largest English-language encyclopedia, Encyclopædia Britannica. All of the Wikipedias in the world have a combined total of more than 1438 million words in 4.6 million articles in over 200 languages! Over 209,000 authors have contributed to all Wikipedia language versions.
How can thousands of contributors with no central controlling authority produce a coherent, well thought out body of knowledge? For one thing, each contributor takes ownership of his or her submissions, and many people are constantly monitoring the aricles for accuracy and making corrections when needed.
Two good examples of how thousands of people can develop excellent software tools are the Apache web server software and the Linux operating system. The Apache web server may be downloaded free from the Apache Software Foundation. Since its initial design it has been constanty updated and improved by many programmers. It is the most popular server on the Web, and is much more widely used than the proprietary Microsoft servers. Linus Thorvalds wrote the intial core for the Linux operating system in the early 1990s and made it freely available to every programmer who wanted to improve it. Linux use grows every year, and runs on supercomputers, PCs, handheld computers, etc.
If you are interested in setting up a wiki, here are some resources for you:
Wiki Web Collaboration, by Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, and Richard Heigl, Springer, 2006.
MediaWiki.org
TWiki.org
Wetpaint.com
San Diego State University
Sitepoint
Commoncraft
Wikipedia
The largest and best-know wiki is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia used by millions of people every day. Wikipedia says there are currently 1,375,837 articles in the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia alone has over 511 million words, more than ten times as many as the next largest English-language encyclopedia, Encyclopædia Britannica. All of the Wikipedias in the world have a combined total of more than 1438 million words in 4.6 million articles in over 200 languages! Over 209,000 authors have contributed to all Wikipedia language versions.
How can thousands of contributors with no central controlling authority produce a coherent, well thought out body of knowledge? For one thing, each contributor takes ownership of his or her submissions, and many people are constantly monitoring the aricles for accuracy and making corrections when needed.
Two good examples of how thousands of people can develop excellent software tools are the Apache web server software and the Linux operating system. The Apache web server may be downloaded free from the Apache Software Foundation. Since its initial design it has been constanty updated and improved by many programmers. It is the most popular server on the Web, and is much more widely used than the proprietary Microsoft servers. Linus Thorvalds wrote the intial core for the Linux operating system in the early 1990s and made it freely available to every programmer who wanted to improve it. Linux use grows every year, and runs on supercomputers, PCs, handheld computers, etc.
If you are interested in setting up a wiki, here are some resources for you:
Wiki Web Collaboration, by Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, and Richard Heigl, Springer, 2006.
MediaWiki.org
TWiki.org
Wetpaint.com
San Diego State University
Sitepoint
Commoncraft
Wikipedia
posted by Jimmy in the Hills | Saturday, September 09, 2006
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