A wiki is an open documentation system best thought of as a fast knowledgebase engine.
See also:
- 1 "wiki" ?! What does the word mean?
- 2 What's a wiki?
- 3 The basic problem
- 4 Solving the basic problem
- 5 A critical decision
- 6 Fear vs. Hope
- 7 The wiki attitude
- 8 Open documentation
- 9 It's all about culture
- 10 It's all about information
- 11 The wiki's accidental abilities
- 12 With great power comes great...
- 13 ... responsability
- 14 Current wiki uses
- 15 My wiki uses
- 16 My God, it's full of stars...
- 17 Some wikis
- 18 Wikis everywhere
- 19 Wikis everything
- 20 Further reading
"wiki" ?! What does the word mean? ∞
- Derived from the native Hawiian word "wiki-wiki", meaning "quick".
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Pronnounced "wee kee wee kee"
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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
- Keep a copy of the website on your hard drive
- Edit pages
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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
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Prevent anyone else from using this feature.
- Open it up
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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 vs Instant Messaging
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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.
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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... ∞
Wikis are naive. Graffiti, Trolls and Spam came.
Wikis are self-administrating, and develop an "interest"-based immune system:
- People-problems
- Dead links
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Stale material
... responsability ∞
Fearless evolution.
- IP logging
- Rollbacks
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Banning
- Handling edit collisions
- Searching
Naivity persists! No common standards.
Current wiki uses ∞
- A knowledgebase.
- A weblog.
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A think-tank.
- Open documentation
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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
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Extremely long-term value
My God, it's full of stars... ∞
- Wikipedia
- Open documentation
- Replacing flagging solutions: The Emails, the Forums, The Blogs.
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Open accounting
Some wikis ∞
- Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki:
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Ward Cunningham's original wiki.
http://wiki.c2.com/ - Wikipedia (English):
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The largest wiki -- over a half a million articles, and that's just what's in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
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
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https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page [ 1 ] was http://gentoo-wiki.com
- NEdit
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https://web.archive.org/web/20060818022851/http://www.nr.no:80/~joachim/Niki/
- Emacs
- Vi-improved
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https://web.archive.org/web/20080405153829/http://www.vi-improved.org:80/wiki/
- Etherboot
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
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https://web.archive.org/web/20200817202341/http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Waikato Linux Users Group
- Wikipedia
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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
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http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiGnome
http://wiki.c2.com/?ExtremeProgramming - Extreme Programming Ottawa
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https://web.archive.org/web/20070712110118/http://www.xpottawa.ca:80/
Further reading ∞
- Portland Pattern Repository
- Wikipedia:Wiki
- Here
- What is a wiki?
Footnotes
Last updated 2021-02-08 at 07:05:25
Notes.
This is rough; really it ought to be expanded. If presenting based on these notes, the slides need to be rounded with interesting stories and other stuff.
ported
corrected the creation date