What is a Wiki?

For those who haven't heard the phrase before, a Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages.

This sounds like just about any other piece of content management software, but Wiki has one particular application - the ability for many users to edit and add to the content as they see fit.

Wiki is a fundamental part of the original ethos of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, always saw it as a collaborative medium. In his book "Weaving the Web" he wrote: "I have always envisaged the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create."

The ethos of the Wiki is about getting everyone involved. This offers a fantastic opportunity for collaboration as users can create their own instruction manuals, problem solving databases or FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).

As an example, the New York Times used a Wiki to create a user manual for its systems. The 500-page manual was effectively written by the people using the systems and only took a couple of months to produce.

But why Wiki? The term is based on the Hawaiian Pidgin English term "wiki", meaning "quick," "fast," or "to hasten". The first wiki was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham to manage the Portland Programming Repository, on programming languages. Another example of how a Wiki can be used is Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Started in 2001,

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia that actively encourages people to contribute. It currently contains more than 753,000 entries and is growing every day. I can't provide you with instant ideas for how a Wiki could be used in your organisation - you just have to use your imagination. But Wiki lends itself to communication tasks where you need to provide a database of knowledge, accessible by all and where it is the end users who have the knowledge, albeit with each person knowing a little.

What you therefore end up with is a powerhouse of information built up from the sum of each small contribution. Wikis are not a universal panacea.

The LA Times experimented with a Wiki where readers were able to edit the paper's own editorials. The experiment was cut short after three days after foul language and pornographic photographs were posted in the middle of discussions about the Iraq war. Viral marketers and spammers are also known to have edited Wikis to promote their products.

The questions of who is in control of a Wiki and how do you know if the information is correct spring to mind, but that is the beauty. As a Wiki is a community-based tool, it is also policed and corrected by the same community.

Some pundits predicted that the Wiki model would become an anarchic mess, but the reality, at least in an intranet form, is that Wikis are generally respected and a valuable business tool. If you would like to a read a more academic paper on Wikis and their uses see http://is.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20050001.pdf.

This PDF document looks at what happened when an intranet-based knowledge base was changed to a collaborative environment where users could exchange ideas. The researchers found that the intranet transformed from being a semi-static bulletin board to a dynamic exchange forum for internal information.

The conclusion was that when editing becomes as easy as surfing, people who want to share knowledge find their intranet much more useful.