What on Earth is a Wiki?
This entry still in draft form, so pay no attention to the dust.
From the folks who created the wildly successful and extraordinarily accessible RSS in Plain English comes Wikis in Plain English.
What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a type of website geared specifically towards collaboration and the pooling of information. Wiki engines feature a suite of tools that enable fast and easy content creation and editing by multiple authors. Integration of WYSIWYG interfaces eliminates the need for technical and/or coding backgrounds and drastically reduces barriers to use.
For the purposes of this post we will be using Wikipedia as the example. There are two main reasons for this:
- Wikipedia is a collaborative success story: Wikipedia is a knowledge base whose massive success is built upon the efforts of an extremely active user community. It therefore provides a real-world example of effective implementation.
- Its underlying engine is open source: MediaWiki is the technical foundation for Wikipedia. It is a freely available and time-tested set of tools currently in use by thousands of people daily. The English-version of Wikipedia alone has 1.2 million pages and supports thousands of content changes daily.
Locating Content
Indexed entries coupled with basic search functionality ensures easy access to existing pages.
Editing Content
Existing content is amended via edit links at the page level or section level. The process utilises a WYSIWYG editor whose toolbar is very similar to many word processing programs. Once changes have been made and submitted the new version of the page is immediately available to others.
Version Control
Version control mechanisms are available via a history page associated with each entry. The page contains a comprehensive list of what changes were made, by whom, and features a comparison tool for evaluating the differences between versions. Unwanted changes can be removed by reverting to previous versions.
Creating New Content
New content can be created in several different ways:
No Search Results
If no results are returned for your search criteria you are given the option of creating the page yourself. “Create this article” loads the WYSIWYG editor.
Requested Articles
A second option is to respond to an article request. Requested articles are submitted from the search results page and are listed within browseable sections. Navigate down through the listings to a specific page and then click the heading to load the WYSIWYG editor.
Create from Scratch
Finally you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creating_new_pages, give the page a name and proceed directly to the WYSIWYG editor.
Other Features
- Discussion: plan pages or resolve issues/disputes of the page itself.
- Upload Files: Upload images and/or other files for use in pages.
- Community Portal: “Learn what tasks need to be done, what groups can be joined, and get or post news about recent events or current activities.”
- External links: enable web information about existing relevant projects to be brought together
