What the hell is a wiki?

17th June 2008

Knowledge sharing through collaboration

A wiki is a web page which anybody with user privileges can log in, edit and save. Technically, wiki's use simplified hypertext markup – a language which strips HTML down into its most basic elements... to you and me you can log on, edit and save.

The first software was called ‘wiki-wiki’ as an alliterative substitute for quick ('wiki' is Hawaiian for 'quick'), avoiding the term ‘quick-web’. The first wiki was created in March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham; by 2005, it contained over 30,000 pages. Since Cunningham released his software, the format has been taken up by public and private projects alike, Wikipedia being the most obvious example.

Thanks to their extreme openness wikis are intrinsically collaborative, inherently good at organising and creating knowledge in specific ways. Wikis are best suited to summarising a debate or collecting knowledge on something; they are not so useful for presenting opinions (even though many people do...). As they depend on cooperation, wikis tend to encourage people to contribute objective material from a neutral standpoint.

Since anyone can edit everything, their content has the potential to be ego-less, time-less and never finished, thus changing the traditional publishing notions of authorship and ownership. Unlike blogs, they value consensus above individual authorship and importance of information over chronological display. Underlying this open system is the concept of ‘softsecurity’ or open moderation; vandalism, for instance, is amended quickly and easily because many people are openly involved at the same time.

Essentially, a wiki is a good example of the collective intelligence of the Web at work: it has the capacity to focus many minds on the completion of one task. The emphasis on collaboration and consensus does not mean wikis lack the contentious debate of the blog. Wikis therefore lend themselves to the purpose of communication in order to produce something which usually exists within fairly well-defined limits: encyclopaedic knowledge; perpetually updated lists; meeting plans, agendas and minutes; even producing a book or magazine. These are things in which collective decision-making is an advantage and conclusions need to be reached.

The level of collaboration and interaction which occurs between the users of wikis is such that they might be regarded as communities. The architecture and functions of the wiki software mean that these communities are formed for the specific purpose of creating, sharing and organising information. They might be based on a pre-existing group of individuals – such as a school or a corporation – or they might be groupings which evolve because of their use of the wiki space. Most of the millions of wikis already in existence are designed for small, well-defined groups of people, such as corporate team members collaborating on presentations or project calendars. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is an example of an online community built around the wiki. Although anyone can edit it, fewer than one per cent of all users carry out half of the total edits.

In the case of Wikis, as with all the other examples of 'Web 2.0' we will be discussing in the 'What the hell is series', social networks and communication are by-products of other forms of information gathering or production. What does it mean for the development of the Web when tools are designed for social networking as the primary end goal of human communication?

Posted by River, 17th June 2008