Wikis
A wiki is a community based website which promotes the editing of or addition/removal of the site's content. The first wiki was made in the mid 1990s and was called, "WikiWikiWeb." A wiki's biggest function is to organize and pool information in a user friendly manner. The best known wiki, Wikipedia, is an example of how information can be collected in an easily navigable way, complete with links between pages, searching, and categories.
The major criticism of open-source wikis, like Wikipedia, is that they are unreliable due to the massive number of contributors. However, "Proponents rely on their community of users who can catch malicious content and correct it. Wikis in general make a basic assumption of the goodness of people.[1]"
Wikis are a hallmark technology of Web 2.0, in that they are based on the collective knowledge and contributions of their users. Thorough repositories of knowledge can easily be created in wikis, even if these individual contributions are relatively small. Wikis also serve as open forums for debate regarding whatever knowledge users are dealing with, and features such as "talk" and "history" pages allow for a meta-examination of how individual wiki articles have changed over time.
Links
- http://wikipedia.org Wikipedia - an Online Encyclopedia
References
[1] a b c d e f g "wiki", Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007. Viewed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikis. 2007-5-14.
