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A wiki is an open documentation system best thought of as a fast knowledgebase engine.

See also:

• Wiki pros and cons

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“wiki” ?! What does the word mean? ∞

• Derived from the native Hawiian word “wiki-wiki”, meaning “quick”.

• Pronnounced “wee kee wee kee”

• Most people prounounce it “wikee”.

What’s a wiki? ∞

A wiki is a web engine which serves re-editable documents.

The original Wiki author, Ward Cunningham, defined the wiki as The simplest online database that could possibly work..

The basic problem ∞

The wiki solves a basic problem:

It’s annoying to update a website

1. Keep a copy of the website on your hard drive
2. Edit pages

3. Upload pages

It may not seem like much, but this task can become extremely frustrating when repeated on a regular basis.

Solving the basic problem ∞

A basic wiki solves this problem by placing an edit button on every page.

Clicking this edit button serves the page’s source in a textbox alongside a save button.

A critical decision ∞

• Lock it down

  • Prevent anyone else from using this feature.

• Open it up

  • Allow everyone to use this feature.

Fear vs. Hope ∞

Herein lies the wiki mindset. Fears are offset by good tools and planning:

• Revision tracking
• rollbacks
• recent changes

• …

This is seeing the positive side of the coin.

The wiki attitude ∞

The wiki attitude is the spirit of openness and collaboration.

Relate this to the creative spirit in open source software.

Open documentation ∞

Open documentation represents a complete shift in mindset and culture.

The spirit of free collaboration drives this new wiki mindset.

It’s all about culture ∞

• IRC versus Instant Messaging

• Email, Mailing lists, Newsgroups, Threaded Comments, Blogs, Forums

Like all these, the wiki has its own unique culture.

It’s all about information ∞

The organization of information is of no particular importance to most systems.

• Mailing list or newsgroup archives.
• A forum.

• Weblogs.

The wiki’s accidental abilities ∞

On a larger scale, a wiki is self-organizing, self-sustaining and breathes with a life not like any other collaboration system.

What is mere conversation elsewhere becomes real collaboration here.

With great power comes great… ∞

(See also With great power comes great responsibility)

Wikis are naive. Graffiti, Trolls and Spam came.

Wikis are self-administrating, and develop an “interest”-based immune system:

• People-problems
• Dead links

• Stale material

… responsability ∞

Fearless evolution.

• IP logging
• Rollbacks

• Banning

–

• Handling edit collisions
• Searching

• Markup languages

Naivety persists! No common standards.

Current wiki uses ∞

• A knowledgebase.
• A weblog.

• A think-tank.

• Open documentation

• Open authoring, open publication

My wiki uses ∞

• I write a lot and I have a bad memory
• Old notes find a new home
• Old thoughts find new life
• Poor attention span vs. a stunning time-to-committing ideas

• Extremely long-term value

My God, it’s full of stars… ∞

• Wikipedia
• Open documentation
• Replacing flagging solutions: The Emails, the Forums, The Blogs.

• Open accounting

Some wikis ∞

• Portland Pattern Repository’s Wiki

  • Ward Cunningham’s original wiki.

• Wikipedia

  • The largest wiki — over a half a million articles, and that’s just what’s in English.

Wikis everywhere ∞

Wikis are everywhere. Many open source projects use it as an open documentation system. Pick your favourite application and see if it has a wiki:

• Gentoo: wiki

  • [ 1 ]

• NEdit

  • was nr.no:80/~joachim/Niki/
• Emacs: wiki
• vi-improved: was vi-improved.org/wiki

• Etherboot

  • http://wiki.etherboot.org/

Wikis everything ∞

If a topic is popular and it doesn’t have its own wiki, it will be featured somewhere on another wiki. Many wikis are general-purpose, so you could find a wiki page on just about any topic.

• LinuxQuestions

  • was https://web.archive.org/web/20200817202341/http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Main_Page |wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Main_Page]]

• Waikato Linux Users Group

  • was http://www.wlug.org.nz/

• Wikipedia

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

• Portland Pattern Repository

  • http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiGnome
  • http://wiki.c2.com/?ExtremeProgramming

• Extreme Programming Ottawa

  • was xpottawa.ca

Further reading ∞

• Portland Pattern Repository

  • FAQ
• Wikipedia:Wiki

• Here

  • What is a wiki?

Footnotes

1. finding archives is messy:
   was http://gentoo-wiki.com
   and en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
   also http://gentoo-wiki.info/ (en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Main_Page) [ ↩ ]