Wikis

The English-language Wikipedia is, by far, the world's largest wiki.

Wiki refers to both the software and the type of website that allows people to quickly and easily add, remove and update web page content in a collaborative way.

This means that many people can change the information on the same web page, with the goal being for the content to become more accurate and comprehensive in a much shorter time than possible with only a few contributors or a single contributor.

Most Wiki sites contain ways to track changes to pages in order to quickly ‘rollback’ to an earlier version in case people vandalise or incorrectly update a page. Some also contain discussion tools to allow people to talk about the content in each page.

The first Wiki was developed in 1994, named after the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’. However, Wikis did not become publicly popular until after 2001, when Wikipedia was launched as a freely available user-created encyclopaedia.

Today Wikipedia, the largest and best-known Wiki, contains over 4.3 million encyclopaedia articles in more than 200 languages. In December 2005, over 27,000 people from around the world contributed had contributed to it. The site is now ranked as one of the top websites in the world.

Wikis have also been used widely in other collaborative efforts; on the public internet, in schools and universities, and within companies, due to their ease of use particularly for people who are not experienced web developers.

Issues with Wikis

While Wikis are a very useful tool for collaboration, they can, and are, often misused.

In many cases, anyone can edit a public Wiki without registering. This makes Wikis easy for people to vandalise by removing correct information and replacing it with incorrect or offensive material.

Wikis may also suffer from the level of writing skills in their contributors and information can be distorted by the opinions of the writers.

However, Wikis remain the most accessible and successful collaborative writing tools on the internet.