Misplaced Pages

Wiki: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editContent deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 15:33, 4 August 2006 view sourceKnowledgeOfSelf (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users48,149 editsm Reverted edits by 208.255.152.227 (talk) to last version by Tawkerbot4← Previous edit Latest revision as of 16:15, 25 December 2024 view source Dessarx (talk | contribs)21 edits Updated short descriptionTags: Mobile edit Mobile app edit Android app edit App description change 
Line 1: Line 1:
{{Short description|Type of website that anyone can can edit}}
{{otheruses}}
{{Pp-semi-indef}}
A '''wiki''' (]: {{IPA|}} <WICK-ee> or {{IPA|}} <WEE-kee><ref></ref>) is a type of ] that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise ] and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for ]. The term wiki can also refer to the ] itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website (''see ]''), or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (and original wiki), ], and the online encyclopedias such as ].
{{Pp-move}}
The first wiki, ], is named after the "Wiki Wiki" line of ] buses in ], ]. It was created in 1994 and installed on the web in 1995 by ], who also created the ]. "Wiki-wiki" means ''"hurry quick"'' in Hawaiian. It also refers to a type of native fish of the islands.
{{about|the concept|its use as a nickname|Misplaced Pages|other uses}}
{{distinguish|Wiiki|WIKY (disambiguation){{!}}WIKY}}


{{Use mdy dates|date=July 2019}}
==History==
<!--
The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki), is named after the "Wiki Wiki" line of "Chance RT-52 shuttle buses" in Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii by Ward Cunningham. Cunningham named WikiWikiWeb that way because he remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web." "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the ] for "What I know is", which describes the knowledge contribution, storage and exchange function.
This page is ''not'' for test edits or new page creation. Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/Help:Your_first_article. Thank you.
-->
]|alt=refer to caption]]


A '''wiki''' ({{IPAc-en|audio=en-us-wiki.ogg|ˈ|w|ɪ|k|i}} {{respell|WICK|ee}}) is a form of ] publication on the ] which is ] and managed by its audience directly through a ]. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal ].
=== Development of Wiki===
] homepage, a wiki software]]
According to Cunningham, ideas of wiki can be traced back to a ] stack he wrote in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, wikis were increasingly recognized as a promising way to develop private- and public-]s, and this potential inspired the founders of the Nupedia encyclopedia project, ] and ], to use wiki technology as a basis for an electronic encyclopedia: Misplaced Pages was launched in January 2001; it originally was based upon ] software, but later switched to its own, open source codebase, now adopted by many other wikis.
Wikis are powered by ], also known as wiki engines. Being a form of ], these differ from other ] systems such as ] or ]s in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader. Wikis have little inherent structure, allowing one to emerge according to the needs of the users.<ref name="Easy Wiki Hosting "/> Wiki engines usually allow content to be written using a ] and sometimes edited with the help of a ].<ref name="Britannica">{{citation|title=wiki|encyclopedia=]|volume=1|publisher=]|year=2007|location=London|url=https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192819/wiki|access-date=April 10, 2008|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080424074513/https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192819/wiki|archive-date=April 24, 2008}}</ref> There are dozens of different wiki engines in use, both standalone and part of other software, such as ]s. Some wiki engines are ], whereas others are ]. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access); for example, editing rights may permit changing, adding, or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Further rules may be imposed to organize content. In addition to hosting user-authored content, wikis allow those users to interact, hold discussions, and collaborate.<ref name="Legal">{{citation|title=Legal Issues for Wikis: The Challenge of User-generated and Peer-produced Knowledge, Content and Culture|last1=Black|first1=Peter|last2=Delaney|first2=Hayden|last3=Fitzgerald|first3=Brian|volume=14|publisher=eLaw J.|year=2007|url=https://elaw.murdoch.edu.au/archives/issues/2007/1/eLaw_legal%20issues%20for%20wikis.pdf|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121222125337/https://elaw.murdoch.edu.au/archives/issues/2007/1/eLaw_legal%20issues%20for%20wikis.pdf|archive-date=December 22, 2012}}</ref>
In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in the enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets and documentation, initially for technical users. In December 2002, ] launched the first commercial open source wiki solution. Open source wikis such as ] and ] grew to over 1 million downloads on the ] repository by 2004. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static ]. There is arguably greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public internet. However, this has not been yet proven. So, we must wait and see.


There are hundreds of thousands of ], both public and private, including wikis functioning as ] resources, ] tools, ], and ]s. ], the developer of the first wiki software, ], originally described wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work".<ref>{{cite web |last=Cunningham |first=Ward |author-link=Ward Cunningham |date=June 27, 2002 |title=What is a Wiki |url=https://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080416212802/https://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki |archive-date=April 16, 2008 |access-date=April 10, 2008 |publisher=WikiWikiWeb}}</ref> "]" (pronounced {{IPA|haw|wiki|}}{{refn|group=note|The realization of the Hawaiian {{IPA|/w/|lang=haw}} ] varies between {{IPA||lang=haw}} and {{IPA||lang=haw}}, and the realization of the {{IPA|/k/|lang=haw}} phoneme varies between {{IPA||lang=haw}} and {{IPA||lang=haw}}, among other realizations. Thus, the pronunciation of the Hawaiian word ''wiki'' varies between {{IPA||lang=haw}}, {{IPA||lang=haw}}, {{IPA||lang=haw}}, and {{IPA||lang=haw}}. See ] for more details.}}) is a ] word meaning "quick".<ref>{{cite web |title=Hawaiian Words; Hawaiian to English |url=https://www.mauimapp.com/moolelo/hwnwdshw.htm |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080914154748/https://www.mauimapp.com/moolelo/hwnwdshw.htm |archive-date=September 14, 2008 |access-date=September 19, 2008 |publisher=mauimapp.com}}</ref><ref>{{Citation |last=Hasan |first=Heather |title=Misplaced Pages, 3.5 million articles and counting |url=https://archive.org/details/wikipedia35milli0000hasa/page/11 |page= |year=2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191026122531/https://archive.org/details/wikipedia35milli0000hasa/page/11 |publisher=New York : Rosen Central |isbn=9781448855575 |access-date=August 6, 2019 |archive-date=October 26, 2019 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Citation |last=Andrews |first=Lorrin |title=A dictionary of the Hawaiian language to which is appended an English-Hawaiian vocabulary and a chronological table of remarkable events |url=https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofhawa00andrrich/ |page=514 |year=1865 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140815064248/https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofhawa00andrrich/ |publisher=Henry M. Whitney |access-date=June 1, 2014 |archive-date=August 15, 2014 |url-status=live}}</ref>
In 2005, the ] experimented with using a wiki in the editorial section of its web site. The ] project was soon shut down as vandals defaced it.


The online encyclopedia project ] is the most popular wiki-based website, as well being ], having been ranked consistently as such since at least 2007.<ref name="Alexa Top Sites">{{cite web|url=https://www.alexa.com/topsites|title=Alexa Top Sites|access-date=December 1, 2016|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150302173920/https://www.alexa.com/topsites|archive-date=March 2, 2015}}</ref> Misplaced Pages is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, with each one pertaining to a specific language. The ] has the largest collection of articles, standing at {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} as of {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}.<ref>{{cite web|title=Misplaced Pages:Size of Misplaced Pages|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia |access-date=January 14, 2024|publisher=]|website=]}}</ref>
==Typical site operations==
A wiki (originally called Quickweb) is an editable website that does not require users to know ]. Most have a system to record changes so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states. A wiki '''system''' may also include various tools, designed to provide users with an easy way to monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki as well as a place to discuss and resolve the many inevitable issues, namely, the inherent disagreement over wiki content. Wiki content can also be misleading, as users are bound to add incorrect information, whether intentionally or accidentally, to the wiki.


== Characteristics ==
Many wikis will allow completely unrestricted access so that people are able to contribute to the site without necessarily having to undergo a process of 'registration', as had usually been required by various other types of interactive websites such as ]s or chat sites. Many users find this a very attractive alternative.


]
==Key characteristics==


In their 2001 book '']'', Cunningham and co-author ] described the essence of the wiki concept:<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Leuf |first1=Bo |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JmvbAAAAMAAJ |title=The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web |last2=Cunningham |first2=Ward |date=2001 |publisher=Addison-Wesley |isbn=978-0-201-71499-9 |page=16 |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples |title= Wiki Design Principles |access-date=2002-04-30 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020430181259/https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples |archive-date=April 30, 2002}}</ref>
A wiki '''enables documents''' to be written collectively in a extremely simple ] language using a ]. A single page in a '''wiki''' is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire body of pages, which are usually highly interconnected via ]s, is "the wiki"; in effect, a wiki is actually a very simple, easy-to-use user-maintained ] for searching or even creating information.
* "A wiki invites all users—not just experts—to edit any ] or to create new pages within the wiki website, using only a standard ] Web browser without any extra ]."
* "Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not."
* "A wiki is ''not'' a carefully crafted site created by experts and professional writers and designed for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the typical visitor/user in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape."


=== Editing ===
A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account. Sometimes session log-in is requested to acquire a "wiki-signature" cookie for autosigning edits. More private wiki servers require user authentication. Many edits, however, can be made in real-time, and appear almost instantaneously online. This can often lead to abuse of the system.


{{redirect|Wikitext|the Misplaced Pages help page|Help:Wikitext|selfref=yes}}
===Pages and editing===


==== Source editing ====
The source format, sometimes known as "'']'''", is augmented with a simplified markup language to indicate various structural and visual conventions. An often used example of one such convention is to start a line of text with an ] ("*") in order to mark it as an item in a ]. Style and syntax can vary a great deal among implementations, some of which also allow HTML tags.


Some wikis will present users with an edit button or link directly on the page being viewed. This will open an ] for writing, formatting, and structuring page content. The interface may be a source editor, which is text-based and employs a lightweight markup language (also known as ''wikitext'', ''wiki markup'', or ''wikicode''), or a ]. For example, in a source editor, starting lines of text with ]s could create a ].
The reasoning behind this design is that HTML, with its many cryptic tags, is not especially ]. Making typical HTML source visible makes the actual text content very hard to read and edit for most users. It is therefore better to promote plain-text editing with a few simple conventions for structure and style.


The ] and features of wiki markup languages for denoting style and structure can vary greatly among ]. Some allow the use of {{abbrlink|HTML|Hypertext Markup Language}} and {{abbrlink|CSS|Cascading Style Sheets}},<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Dohrn |first1=Hannes |last2=Riehle |first2=Dirk |chapter=Design and implementation of the Sweble Wikitext parser: Unlocking the structured data of Misplaced Pages |date=2011 |title=Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration |chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2038558.2038571 |language=en |publisher=ACM |pages=72–81 |doi=10.1145/2038558.2038571 |isbn=978-1-4503-0909-7}}</ref> while others prevent the use of these to foster uniformity in appearance.
It is also somewhat beneficial that users cannot directly use all the capabilities of HTML, such as ] and ]. Consistency in look and feel is also achieved: In many wiki implementations, an active hyperlink is exactly as it is shown, unlike in HTML where the invisible hyperlink can have an arbitrary visible anchor text. This goes along with some extra safety for the user: Permitting users to write in HTML might allow harmful or annoying code (for example, JavaScript code that prevents the reader from marking part of the text)..


==== Example of syntax ====
{| class="wikitable"
!Wiki syntax (])
!Equivalent HTML
!Rendered output
|---- valign="top"
|<tt><nowiki>"''Doctor''? No other title? A ''scholar''? And
he rates above the civil authority?"</nowiki>


A short section of '']'' rendered in wiki markup:
"Why, certainly," replied Hardin, amiably. "We're all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so much a world as a scientific foundation&amp;mdash;under the direct control of the Emperor."</tt>
|<tt>&lt;p&gt;<br />
&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Doctor&lt;/em&gt;? No other title? A &lt;em&gt;scholar&lt;/em&gt;? And he rates above the civil authority?&amp;quot;<br />
&lt;/p&gt;<br>&lt;p&gt;<br />
&amp;quot;Why, certainly,&amp;quot; replied Hardin, amiably. &amp;quot;We're all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so much a world as a scientific foundation&amp;mdash;under the direct control of the Emperor.&amp;quot;<br />
&lt;/p&gt;</tt>
|"''Doctor''? No other title? A ''scholar''? And he rates above the civil authority?"


<!-- Note: As of HTML5 (W3C Recommendation status in 2014), <p> does not require a closing tag. -->
"Why, certainly," replied Hardin, amiably. "We're all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so much a world as a scientific foundation&mdash;under the direct control of the Emperor."
{| class="wikitable noprint"
|-
! style="width:33.3%;"|Wiki markup
! style="width:33.3%;"|Equivalent in HTML
! style="width:33.3%;"|Output shown to readers
|- style="vertical-align:top;"
|<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">"Take some more ]," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had '''nothing''' yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take ''less''," said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take ''more'' than nothing."</syntaxhighlight>
|<syntaxhighlight lang="html">"Take some more <a href="/Tea" title="Tea">tea</a>," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

<p>"I've had <strong>nothing</strong> yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

<p>"You mean you can't take <em>less</em>," said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take <em>more</em> than nothing."</syntaxhighlight>
|<br>"Take some more ]," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had '''nothing''' yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take ''less''," said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take ''more'' than nothing."
|} |}
{{anchor|visual|wysiwyg|WYSIWYG}}
(Quotation above from '']'' by ])

==== Visual editing ====

While wiki engines have traditionally offered source editing to users, in recent years some implementations have added a rich text editing mode. This is usually implemented, using ], as an interface which translates formatting instructions chosen from a ] into the corresponding wiki markup or HTML. This is generated and submitted to the server ], shielding users from the technical detail of markup editing and making it easier for them to change the content of pages. An example of such an interface is the ] in ], the wiki engine used by Misplaced Pages. WYSIWYG editors may not provide all the features available in wiki markup, and some users prefer not to use them, so a source editor will often be available simultaneously.

==== Version history ====

Some wiki implementations keep a record of changes made to wiki pages, and may store every version of the page permanently. This allows authors to revert a page to an older version to rectify a mistake, or counteract a malicious or inappropriate edit to its content.<ref name="auto">{{harvnb|Ebersbach|2008|p=178}}</ref>

These stores are typically presented for each page in a list, called a "log" or "edit history", available from the page via a link in the interface. The list displays ] for each revision to the page, such as the time and date of when it was stored, and the name of the person who created it, alongside a link to view that specific revision. A ] (short for "difference") feature may be available, which highlights the changes between any two revisions.

==== Edit summaries ====

{{redirect|Edit summary|the Misplaced Pages help page|Help:Edit summary|selfref=y}}
The edit history view in many wiki implementations will include ''edit summaries'' written by users when submitting changes to a page. Similar to the function of a ] in a ] system, an edit summary is a short piece of text which summarizes and perhaps explains the change, for example "Corrected grammar" or "Fixed table formatting to not extend past page width". It is not inserted into the article's main text.

=== Navigation ===

Traditionally, wikis offer free navigation between their pages via ] links in page text, rather than requiring users to follow a formal or structured navigation scheme. Users may also create ]es or ] pages, hierarchical categorization via a ], or other forms of ] content organization. Wiki implementations can provide one or more ways to categorize or ] pages to support the maintenance of such index pages, such as a ] feature which displays all pages that link to a given page. Adding categories or tags to a page makes it easier for other users to find it.

Most wikis allow the titles of pages to be searched amongst, and some offer ] of all stored content.

==== Navigation between wikis ====

[[File:Development of "Mathe für Nicht-Freaks" from Sep 2009 to June 2016.webm|thumb|Visualization of the collaborative work in
the German wiki project ]]]
{{redirect|WikiNode|the app for the Apple iPad|WikiNodes}}

Some wiki communities have established navigational networks between each other using a system called ''WikiNodes''. A WikiNode is a page on a wiki which describes and links to other, related wikis. Some wikis operate a structure of ''neighbors'' and ''delegates'', wherein a neighbor wiki is one which discusses similar content or is otherwise of interest, and a delegate wiki is one which has agreed to have certain content delegated to it.<ref>{{cite web |publisher=WikiNodes |title=Frequently Asked Questions |url=https://wikinodes.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.fcg/FrequentlyAskedQuestions |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070810213702/https://wikinodes.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.fcg/FrequentlyAskedQuestions |archive-date=August 10, 2007}}</ref> WikiNode networks act as ]s which may be navigated from one node to another to find a wiki which addresses a specific subject.

=== Linking to and naming pages ===

The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations. Beginning with the WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used ] to name pages,<ref>Bäckström, A., & Wändin, L. (2005). Spatial Hypertext Editing Tools for Wiki Web Systems.</ref> which is when words in a phrase are ] and the spaces between them removed. In this system, the phrase "camel case" would be rendered as "CamelCase". In early wiki engines, when a page was displayed, any instance of a camel case phrase would be transformed into a link to another page named with the same phrase.

While this system made it easy to link to pages, it had the downside of requiring pages to be named in a form deviating from standard spelling, and titles of a single word required abnormally capitalizing one of the letters (e.g. "WiKi" instead of "Wiki"). Some wiki implementations attempt to improve the display of camel case page titles and links by reinserting spaces and possibly also reverting to lower case, but this simplistic method is not able to correctly present titles of mixed capitalization. For example, "]" as a page title would be written as "KingdomOfFrance", and displayed as "Kingdom Of France".

To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained ''free links'', wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. The concept was given the name in its first implementation, in ] in February 2001.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.usemod.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UseModWiki/OldVersions | title = UseModWiki/OldVersions | last = Adams | first = Clifford | date = 26 April 2001 | access-date = 25 July 2024}}</ref> In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example <kbd><nowiki>]</nowiki></kbd>. This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.

It is typically possible for users of a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite the creation of those pages. Such links are usually differentiated visually in some fashion, such as being colored red instead of the default blue, which was the case in the original WikiWikiWeb, or by appearing as a question mark next to the linked words.

== History ==

{{Main|History of wikis}}
]
] was the first wiki.<ref name="ebersbach10">{{harvnb|Ebersbach|2008|p=10}}</ref> Ward Cunningham started developing it in 1994, and installed it on the ] ] on March 25, 1995. Cunningham gave it the name after remembering a ] counter employee telling him to take the "]" bus that runs between the airport's terminals, later observing that "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."<ref name="cunningham">{{cite web | last = Cunningham | first = Ward | url = https://c2.com/doc/etymology.html | title = Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki | date = November 1, 2003 | publisher = WikiWikiWeb | access-date = March 9, 2007 | url-status=live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070317120823/https://c2.com/doc/etymology.html | archive-date = March 17, 2007 | df = mdy-all }}</ref><ref name="history">{{cite web |last=Cunningham |first=Ward |url=https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory |title=Wiki History |publisher=WikiWikiWeb |date=February 25, 2008 |access-date=March 9, 2007 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020621221535/https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory |archive-date=June 21, 2002 }}</ref>

Cunningham's system was inspired by his having used ]'s hypertext software ], which allowed users to create interlinked "stacks" of virtual cards.<ref name="artima">{{cite web |title=Exploring with Wiki: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part I |author=Bill Venners |date=October 20, 2003 |url=https://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html |publisher=artima developer |access-date=December 12, 2014 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150205091836/https://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html |archive-date=February 5, 2015 }}</ref> HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of ], the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text."<ref name="Britannica"/><ref name="hypercard">{{cite web | last = Cunningham | first = Ward | url = https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiHyperCard | title = Wiki Wiki Hyper Card | publisher = WikiWikiWeb | date = July 26, 2007 | access-date = March 9, 2007 | url-status=live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070406064446/https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiHyperCard | archive-date = April 6, 2007 | df = mdy-all }}</ref> Cunningham says his goals were to link together people's experiences to create a new literature to document programming ], and to harness people's natural desire to talk and tell stories with a technology that would feel comfortable to those not used to "authoring".<ref name="artima" />

Misplaced Pages became the most famous wiki site{{Clarification needed|date=October 2024}}, launched in January 2001 and entering the top ten most popular websites in 2007. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, ]s, and documentation, initially for technical users. Some ] as their collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance ]. On March 15, 2007, the word ''wiki'' was listed in the online '']''.<ref name="OED1">{{cite encyclopedia | url = https://www.oed.com/public/update0703/march-2007-update | title = March 2007 update | dictionary = ] | date = March 1, 2007 | last = Diamond | first = Graeme | access-date = March 16, 2007 | url-status=live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110107132110/https://www.oed.com/public/update0703/march-2007-update | archive-date = January 7, 2011 | df = mdy-all }}</ref>

== Alternative definitions ==

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the word "wiki" was used to refer to both user-editable websites and the software that powers them, and the latter definition is still occasionally in use.<ref name="Easy Wiki Hosting">{{citation |url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc700339.aspx |title=Easy Wiki Hosting, Scott Hanselman's blog, and Snagging Screens |date=July 2008 |last=Mitchell |first=Scott |publisher=MSDN Magazine |access-date=March 9, 2010 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100316192702/https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc700339.aspx |archive-date=March 16, 2010 }}</ref>

By 2014, Ward Cunningham's thinking on the nature of wikis had evolved, leading him to write<ref>{{Cite tweet|number=531149812976996352|user=WardCunningham|title=The plural of wiki is wiki. See https://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/an-install-of-wiki.html|author=Ward Cunningham|date=November 8, 2014|author-link=Ward Cunningham|access-date=March 18, 2019}}</ref> that the word "wiki" should not be used to refer to a single website, but rather to a mass of user-editable pages or sites so that a single website is not "a wiki" but "an instance of wiki". In this concept of wiki federation, in which the same content can be hosted and edited in more than one location in a manner similar to ], the idea of a single discrete "wiki" no longer made sense.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/view/an-install-of-wiki|title=Smallest Federated Wiki|work=wiki.org|access-date=September 28, 2015|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150928165957/https://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/view/an-install-of-wiki|archive-date=September 28, 2015}}</ref>

== Implementations ==

{{see also|List of wiki software}}
The software which powers a wiki may be implemented as a series of ] which operate an existing ], a standalone ] that runs on one or more web servers, or in the case of ]s, run as a standalone application on a single computer. Some wikis use ]s to store page content, while others use a ],<ref name=Augar>{{cite journal |title=Teaching and learning online with wikis |pages=95–104 |last1=Naomi |first1=Augar |first2=Ruth |last2=Raitman |first3=Wanlei |last3=Zhou |journal =Proceedings of Beyond the Comfort Zone: 21st ASCILITE Conference |citeseerx=10.1.1.133.1456|year=2004}}</ref> as ] database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching.

== Hosting ==

{{see also|Comparison of wiki hosting services}}
Wikis can also be created on ]s (also known as ''wiki farms''), where the ] software is implemented by the wiki farm owner, and may do so at no charge in exchange for ] being displayed on the wiki's pages. Some hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis requiring ] to access. Free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page.

== Trust and security ==

=== Access control ===

The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. System administrators are responsible for the installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. Wiki administrators maintain content and, through having elevated ]s, are granted additional functions (including, for example, preventing edits to pages, deleting pages, changing users' access rights, or blocking them from editing).<ref>{{cite journal|title=Analysis of the use of Wiki-based collaborations in enhancing student learning|last=Cubric|first=Marija|publisher=University of Hertfordshire|year=2007|url=https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2299/3672|access-date=April 25, 2011|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110515005430/https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2299/3672|archive-date=May 15, 2011 |periodical=UH Business School Working Paper}}</ref>

=== Controlling changes ===

{{Self-reference|"Recent changes" redirects here. For the Misplaced Pages help page, see ]. For the recent changes page itself, see ].}}
]
Wikis are generally designed with a '']'' philosophy in which it is easy to correct mistakes or harmful changes, rather than attempting to prevent them from happening in the first place. This allows them to be very open while providing a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. Most wikis offer a ''recent changes'' page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.<ref>{{harvnb|Ebersbach|2008|p=20}}</ref> Some wikis can filter the list to remove edits flagged by users as "minor" and ] edits.<ref>{{harvnb|Ebersbach|2008|p=54}}</ref> The version history feature allows harmful changes to be reverted quickly and easily.<ref name="auto"/>

Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing ] of a page or set of pages to maintain quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be alerted of modifications to them, allowing them to verify the validity of new editions quickly.<ref>{{harvnb|Ebersbach|2008|p=109}}</ref> Such a feature is often called a ''watchlist''.

Some wikis also implement ''patrolled revisions'', in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate. A ''flagged revisions'' system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed.<ref>{{citation|title=Misplaced Pages's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences|journal=Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law|last = Goldman | first = Eric|volume=8}}</ref>

Wikis may allow any person on the web to edit their content without having to register an account on the site first (''anonymous editing''), or require registration as a condition of participation.<ref>{{harvnb|Ebersbach|2008|p=108}}</ref> On implementations where an administrator is able to restrict editing of a page or group of pages to a specific group of users, they may have the option to prevent anonymous editing while allowing it for registered users.<ref name=Noveck/>

=== Trustworthiness and reliability of content ===

Critics of publicly editable wikis argue that they could be easily tampered with by malicious individuals, or even by well-meaning but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content. Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified by a wiki's community of users.<ref name="Britannica"/><ref name="ebersbach10"/> High editorial standards in medicine and health sciences articles, in which users typically use peer-reviewed journals or university textbooks as sources, have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Barsky |first1=Eugene |last2=Giustini |first2=Dean |date=December 2007 |title=Introducing Web 2.0: wikis for health librarians |url=https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/497/c07-036.pdf |url-status=live |volume=28 |issue=4 |pages=147–150 |doi=10.5596/c07-036 |issn=1708-6892 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120430195019/https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/497/c07-036.pdf |archive-date=April 30, 2012 |access-date=November 7, 2011 |journal=Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association |doi-access=free }}</ref> Wiki implementations retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert ]ers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they have analyzed.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Yager |first=Kevin |date=March 16, 2006 |title=Wiki ware could harness the Internet for science |journal=Nature |volume=440 |issue=7082 |pages=278 |bibcode=2006Natur.440..278Y |doi=10.1038/440278a |pmid=16541049 |doi-access=free | issn = 0028-0836 }}</ref>

=== Security ===

{{hatnote group|{{redirect-distinguish|Edit war|Edit conflict}}
{{self-reference|For Misplaced Pages's policy on edit warring, see ].}}
}}

] and ] on wikis, where content is changed to something deliberately incorrect or a ], offensive material or nonsense is added, or content is maliciously removed, can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites it is possible for such changes to go unnoticed for a long period.

In addition to using the approach of soft security for protecting themselves, larger wikis may employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism. For example, on Misplaced Pages, the bot ''ClueBot NG'' uses ] to identify likely harmful changes, and reverts these changes within minutes or even seconds.<ref>{{cite web|url = https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kills-trolls-how-wikipedia-robots-snuff-out-vandalism|title = This machine kills trolls|date = February 18, 2014|access-date = September 7, 2014|website = ]|last = Hicks|first = Jesse|url-status=live|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140827115824/https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/18/5412636/this-machine-kills-trolls-how-wikipedia-robots-snuff-out-vandalism|archive-date = August 27, 2014|df = mdy-all}}</ref>

Disagreements between users over the content or appearance of pages may cause ''edit wars'', where competing users repetitively change a page back to a version that they favor. Some wiki software allows administrators to prevent pages from being editable until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate.<ref name=Legal/>

Some wikis may be subject to external structures of governance which address the behavior of persons with access to the system, for example in academic contexts.<ref name=Augar/>

==== Harmful external links ====

As most wikis allow the creation of hyperlinks to other sites and services, the addition of malicious hyperlinks, such as sites infected with ], can also be a problem. For example, in 2006 a German Misplaced Pages article about the ] was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website, and users of vulnerable Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link had their systems infected with the worm.<ref name=Legal/> Some wiki engines offer a ] feature which prevents users from adding hyperlinks to specific sites that have been placed on the list by the wiki's administrators.


== Communities ==
Some recent wiki engines use a different method: they allow "]" editing, usually by means of ] or an ] control that translates graphically entered formatting instructions, such as "bold" and "italics", into the corresponding HTML tags. In those implementations, the markup of a newly-edited HTML version of the page is generated and submitted to the server ], and the user is shielded from this technical detail. Users who do not have the necessary plugin can generally edit the page, usually by directly editing the raw HTML code. More recently, wiki engines are generating wiki syntax instead of HTML. This way, users who are comfortable editing in wiki syntax can carry on.


====A Markup Standard==== === Applications ===
Although for years the '']'' standard was the syntax of the original WikiWikiWeb, currently the formatting instructions vary depending on the wiki engine. Simple wikis allow only basic text formatting, whereas more complex ones have support for tables, images, formulas, or even interactive elements such as polls and games. Many people switch between wiki engines, from one to another. Because of the difficulty in using several syntaxes, many people are putting considerable effort into defining a wiki markup standard (see efforts by ] and ).


]
===Linking and creating pages===
The English Misplaced Pages has the largest user base among wikis on the ]<ref>{{cite web|url=https://s23.org/wikistats/largest_html.php?sort=users_desc&th=8000&lines=500 |title=List of largest (Media)wikis |access-date=December 12, 2014 |publisher=S23-Wiki |date=April 3, 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140825164715/https://s23.org/wikistats/largest_html.php?sort=users_desc&th=8000&lines=500 |archive-date=August 25, 2014 }}</ref> and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.alexa.com/topsites|title=Alexa Top 500 Global Sites|access-date=April 26, 2015|publisher=]|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150302173920/https://www.alexa.com/topsites|archive-date=March 2, 2015}}</ref> Other large wikis include the ], ], ], and previously ], a Swedish-language knowledge base. ] and health-related wiki examples include ], an online collaborative medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts.<ref name=BMC>{{citation|title=Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education |doi=10.1186/1472-6920-6-41|pmc=1564136|journal=BMC Medical Education|volume=6|pmid=16911779|page=41|year=2006|first1=M. N. K.|last1=Boulos|first2=I.|last2=Maramba|first3=S.|last3=Wheeler |doi-access=free }}</ref> Many wiki ] are private, particularly within ]. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to help produce software documentation.<ref>{{cite journal | title = Wikis for Collaborative Software Documentation | first1 = C. | last1 = Müller | first2 = L. | last2 = Birn | url = https://i-know.tugraz.at/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/47_wikis-for-collaborative-software-documentation.pdf | publisher = Proceedings of I-KNOW '06 | date = September 6–8, 2006 | url-status=dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110706095145/https://i-know.tugraz.at/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/47_wikis-for-collaborative-software-documentation.pdf |website=i-know.tugraz.at | archive-date = July 6, 2011 | df = mdy-all }}</ref> A study of corporate wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.<ref>{{citation |first1 = A. | last1 = Majchrzak | first2 = C. | last2 = Wagner | first3 = D. | last3 = Yates |chapter=Corporate wiki users: results of a survey |title=Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis | publisher=Symposium on Wikis |year=2006 |pages=99–104 |doi=10.1145/1149453.1149472 |isbn=978-1-59593-413-0 | s2cid = 13206858 }}</ref> From a study of thousands of wiki deployments, Jonathan Grudin concluded careful stakeholder analysis and education are crucial to successful wiki deployment.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=138573 |title=Wikis at work: Success factors and challenges for sustainability of enterprise wikis |first1=Jonathan |last1=Grudin |first2=Erika Shehan |last2=Poole |website=Microsoft Research |year=2015 |access-date=June 16, 2015 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150904031729/https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=138573 |archive-date=September 4, 2015 }}</ref>
Wikis are a true ] medium, with non-linear navigational structures. Each page typically contains a large number of links to other pages. Hierarchical navigation pages often exist in larger wikis, often a consequence of the original page creation process, but they do not have to be used. Links are created using a specific syntax, the so-called "link pattern".


In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.<ref>{{citation|first=Michelle|last=Conlin|title=E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago|date=November 28, 2005|work=Bloomberg BusinessWeek|url=https://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-11-27/e-mail-is-so-five-minutes-ago|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121017131307/https://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-11-27/e-mail-is-so-five-minutes-ago|archive-date=October 17, 2012}}</ref>{{update inline|date=July 2013}} Wikis can be used for ].<ref>{{cite web|title=HomePage|url=https://projectmanagementwiki.org|work=Project Management Wiki.org|accessdate=May 8, 2012|url-status=live|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20140816221509/https://projectmanagementwiki.org/|archivedate=August 16, 2014}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=Ways to Wiki: Project Management|url=https://www.editme.com/Ways-to-Wiki-Project-Management|work=EditMe|date=January 4, 2010|url-status=live|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120508152328/https://www.editme.com/Ways-to-Wiki-Project-Management|archivedate=May 8, 2012}}</ref>{{unreliable source?|failed=y|date=July 2013}} Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142215.1142259|title=SensorWiki.org: a collaborative resource for researchers and interface designers |isbn=978-2-84426-314-8|first1 = M. M. | last1 = Wanderley | first2 = D. | last2 = Birnbaum | first3 = J. | last3 = Malloch | year=2006 |journal=NIME '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression |publisher=IRCAM – Centre Pompidou|pages=180–183 }}</ref> In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on ], ], departmental documentation, and committee work.<ref>{{cite journal |title=Putting Wikis to Work in Libraries |first=Nancy T. |last=Lombardo |volume=27 |issue=2 |date=June 2008 |journal=Medical Reference Services Quarterly |pages=129–145 |doi=10.1080/02763860802114223 |pmid = 18844087 |s2cid=11552140 }}</ref> In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend among industries toward collaboration placed a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.<ref name=Legal/>
Originally, most wikis used ] when naming program identifiers, produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word "CamelCase" is itself an example of CamelCase). While CamelCase makes linking very easy, it also leads to links which are written in a form that deviates from the standard spelling. CamelCase-based wikis are instantly recognizable because they have many links with names such as "TableOfContents" and "BeginnerQuestions". Note that it is possible for a wiki to render the visible anchor for such links "pretty" by reinserting spaces, and possibly also reverting to lower case. However, this reprocessing of the link to improve the readability of the anchor is limited by the loss of capitalization information caused by CamelCase reversal. For example, "RichardWagner" should be rendered as "Richard Wagner", whereas "PopularMusic" should be rendered as "popular music". There is no easy way to determine which capital letters should remain capitalized.


Wikis have found some use within the legal profession and within the government. Examples include the ]'s ], designed to share and collect ]s, ], which was used by the ] to assist with review of documents about the internment of detainees in ];<ref>{{cite journal|first1=Beth Simone|last1=Noveck|title=Misplaced Pages and the Future of Legal Education|url=https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/jled57&id=11&div=&collection=|journal=Journal of Legal Education|date=2007 |pages=3|volume=57}}</ref> and the wiki of the ], used to post court rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The ] operates ], a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding ] relevant to the examination of pending patent applications. ], New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. ] founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called ], whose growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit.<ref name=Noveck>{{Citation|title=Misplaced Pages and the Future of Legal Education|last=Noveck|first=Beth Simone|journal=Journal of Legal Education|volume=57|issue=1|url=https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/jled57&div=8&id=&page=|date=March 2007|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140703005842/https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals%2Fjled57&div=8&id=&page=|archive-date=July 3, 2014}}{{subscription required}}</ref>
===Searching===
Most wikis offer at least a title ], and sometimes a full-text search. The scalability of the search depends on whether the wiki engine uses a database; indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. On ], a wiki-based encyclopedia, the so-called "Go button" allows readers to view a page that matches the entered search criteria as closely as possible. The ] search engine was created to enable searches across multiple wikis. Search is keyword-based.


In academic contexts, wikis have also been used as project collaboration and research support systems.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Au|first=C. H.|title=2017 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) |chapter=Wiki as a research support system – A trial in information systems research |date=December 2017|pages=2271–2275|doi=10.1109/IEEM.2017.8290296|isbn=978-1-5386-0948-4|s2cid=44029462}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2014/WCECS2014_pp358-363.pdf|title=Using Wiki for Project Collaboration – with Comparison on Facebook|last=Au|first=Cheuk-hang|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190412152358/https://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2014/WCECS2014_pp358-363.pdf|archive-date=April 12, 2019|url-status=live}}</ref>
=== Server-side versus client-side wiki ===
By far, the most common wiki systems are ]. In essence, the edit, display and control functions are provided on the server through the wikiengine that renders the content into a HTML-based page for display in a web browser.


==== City wikis ====
A ] wiki system only requires the server to "serve" wiki files in much the same way as a web server allows HTML files to be retrieved using HTTP. In this type of wiki system, all the execution required to convert the underlying wiki text into an onscreen formatted display page could reside in the client browser. Likewise, the editing tools and functionality reside with the browser.


A ''city wiki'' or ''local wiki'' is a wiki used as a ] and ] for a specific ] locale.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Andersen |first=Michael |title=Welcome to Davis, Calif.: Six lessons from the world's best local wiki|date=2009-11-06 |url=https://www.niemanlab.org/2009/11/welcome-to-davis-calif-six-lessons-from-the-worlds-best-local-wiki/|access-date=2023-01-06|website=Nieman Lab|archive-date=August 8, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130808084426/https://www.niemanlab.org/2009/11/welcome-to-davis-calif-six-lessons-from-the-worlds-best-local-wiki/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|last=McGann |first=Laura |title=Knight News Challenge: Is a wiki site coming to your city? Local Wiki will build software to make it simple|date=2010-06-18 |url=https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/knight-news-challenge-is-a-wiki-site-coming-to-your-city-local-wiki-will-build-software-to-make-it-simple/|access-date=2023-01-06|website=Nieman Lab|archive-date=June 25, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130625035936/https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/knight-news-challenge-is-a-wiki-site-coming-to-your-city-local-wiki-will-build-software-to-make-it-simple/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>]: Makice, Kevin (July 15, 2009). {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150427080359/https://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/hey-kid-support-your-local-wiki/ |date=April 27, 2015 }}</ref> The term city wiki is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. Such a wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. Such highly localized information might be appropriate for a wiki targeted at local viewers, and could include:
The client-side wiki system parallels HTML in that the page becomes a rendering instruction for the browser to interpret.
* Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centers
Client-side wiki systems may be little more than a code plugin to a more traditional web browser.
* Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop
* Statistical information about a specific road in a city
* Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor
* A biography of a local mayor and other persons


=== Growth factors ===
==Controlling changes==
]
Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is the "Recent Changes" page&mdash;a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of all the edits made within a given timeframe. Some wikis can filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts ("]s").


A study of several hundred wikis in 2008 showed that a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth;<ref>{{cite journal | title = Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis | publisher = The Centre for Research in Social Simulation | first1 = C. | last1 = Roth | first2 = D. | last2 = Taraborelli | first3 = N. | last3 = Gilbert | year = 2008 | page = 3 | quote = Figure 4 shows that having a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth. | url = https://nitens.org/docs/wikidyn.pdf | url-status=live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20171011105517/https://nitens.org/docs/wikidyn.pdf | archive-date = October 11, 2017 | df = mdy-all |website=nitens.org }}</ref> access controls restricting editing to registered users tends to reduce growth; a lack of such access controls tends to fuel new user registration; and that a higher ratio of administrators to regular users has no significant effect on content or population growth.<ref>{{cite journal | title = Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis | publisher = The Centre for Research in Social Simulation | first1 = C. | last1 = Roth | first2 = D. | last2 = Taraborelli | first3 = N. | last3 = Gilbert | year = 2008 | url = https://epubs.surrey.ac.uk:80/1565/1/fulltext.pdf | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120616204038/https://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1565/1/fulltext.pdf | url-status=dead | archive-date = June 16, 2012 | access-date = November 9, 2018 | df = mdy-all |website=Surrey Research Insight Open Access }}</ref>
From the change log, other functions are accessible in most wikis: the ''Revision History'' showing previous page versions; and the ''] feature'', highlighting the changes between two revisions. Using the Revision History, an editor can view and restore a previous version of the article. The diff feature can be used to decide whether or not this is necessary. A regular wiki user can view the diff of an edit listed on the "Recent Changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, consult the history, restoring a previous revision; this process is more or less streamlined, depending on the wiki software used.


== Legal environment ==
In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "Recent Changes" page, some wiki engines provide additional content control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly.


Joint authorship of articles, in which different users participate in correcting, editing, and compiling the finished product, can also cause editors to become ] of the copyright, making it impossible to republish without permission of all co-owners, some of whose identities may be unknown due to pseudonymous or anonymous editing.<ref name=Legal/> Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an ] license. Version 2 of the ] includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing, and ] licenses are also popular. When no license is specified, an implied license to read and add content to a wiki may be deemed to exist on the grounds of business necessity and the inherent nature of a wiki.
==Vandalism==
The open philosophy of most wikis&mdash;of allowing anyone to edit content&mdash;does not ensure that editors are well intentioned. ] is a constant problem for wikis. Studies from ] claim that most vandalism to Misplaced Pages is removed in 5 minutes or less. However, in some cases it takes longer, as in the ]. In some cases, user accounts or ] are banned from editing certain wikis, and certain pages may be locked, to prevent further vandalism.


Wikis and their users can be held liable for certain activities that occur on the wiki. If a wiki owner displays indifference and forgoes controls (such as banning copyright infringers) that they could have exercised to stop copyright infringement, they may be deemed to have authorized infringement, especially if the wiki is primarily used to infringe copyrights or obtains a direct financial benefit, such as advertising revenue, from infringing activities.<ref name=Legal/> In the United States, wikis may benefit from ], which protects sites that engage in "]" policing of harmful material, with no requirement on the quality or quantity of such self-policing.<ref>{{cite web | title = Self-Regulation: How Misplaced Pages Leverages User-Generated Quality Control Under Section 230 | first1 = Kathleen M. | last1 = Walsh | first2 = Sarah | last2 = Oh | date = February 23, 2010 | url = https://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=sarah_oh | url-status=dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140106040705/https://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=sarah_oh | archive-date = January 6, 2014 | df = mdy-all }}</ref> It has also been argued that a wiki's enforcement of certain rules, such as anti-bias, verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no-original-research policies, could pose legal risks.<ref>{{Citation|last = Myers | first = Ken S.|title=Wikimmunity: Fitting the Communications Decency Act to Misplaced Pages |ssrn-access=free |url=https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=916529 |journal=Harvard Journal of Law and Technology|publisher=The Berkman Center for Internet and Society|year=2008|ssrn=916529|volume=20|page=163 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240124221800/https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=256097088074025084113093077025016081116048056043070018004102098070073113118090069100062035127024024056008082071071025106120037047073003040121094126086064082109026009057126000010065095025066118082112066000081066084026080001028089015088099022125003&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE |archive-date= Jan 24, 2024 }}</ref> When ] occurs on a wiki, theoretically, all users of the wiki can be held liable, because any of them had the ability to remove or amend the defamatory material from the "publication". It remains to be seen whether wikis will be regarded as more akin to an ], which is generally not held liable due to its lack of control over publications' contents, than a publisher.<ref name=Legal/> It has been recommended that trademark owners monitor what information is presented about their trademarks on wikis, since courts may use such content as evidence pertaining to public perceptions, and they can edit entries to rectify misinformation.<ref>{{citation|journal=Managing Intellectual Property|volume=179|last=Jarvis|first=Joshua|title=Police your marks in a wiki world|url=https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/manintpr179&div=31&id=&page=|pages=101–103|date=May 2008|issue=179|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304044437/https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals%2Fmanintpr179&div=31&id=&page=|archive-date=March 4, 2016}}</ref>
The approach of making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage has been characterised as '']''.


==Wiki communities == == Conferences ==
Many wiki communities are private, particularly within enterprises as ]. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. The democratic, all-encompassing nature of Misplaced Pages is a significant factor in its growth, while many other wikis are highly specialized.
Today, the English-language Misplaced Pages is, by far, the world's largest wiki; the German-language Misplaced Pages is the second-largest, while the other Wikipedias fill many of the remaining upper slots. Other large wikis include the ], ], ] and ], a Swedish-language knowledge base. The largest wikis are listed at ] (and a list from July 3, 2004 on
). Many public wikis are listed at
- a wiki of wiki.


Active conferences and meetings about wiki-related topics include:
One way of finding a wiki on a specific subject is to follow the ] network from wiki to wiki; another is to take a Wiki bus tour: ]. Domain names containing "wiki" are growing in popularity to support specific niches.
* Atlassian Summit, an annual conference for users of ] software, including ].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://summit.atlassian.com/ |title=Atlassian |publisher=Summit.atlassian.com |access-date=June 20, 2011 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110613081406/https://summit.atlassian.com/ |archive-date=June 13, 2011 }}</ref>
* OpenSym (called WikiSym until 2014), an ] dedicated to research about wikis and open collaboration.
* SMWCon, a bi-annual conference for users and developers of ].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://semantic-mediawiki.org/SMWCon |title=SMWCon |publisher=Semantic-mediawiki.org |access-date=June 20, 2011 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110714183910/https://semantic-mediawiki.org/SMWCon |archive-date=July 14, 2011 }}</ref>
* TikiFest, a frequently held meeting for users and developers of ].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://tiki.org/TikiFest |title=TikiFest |publisher=Tiki.org |access-date=June 20, 2011 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110630070137/https://tiki.org/TikiFest |archive-date=June 30, 2011 }}</ref>
* ], an annual conference dedicated to the research and practice of ] projects like Misplaced Pages.


Former wiki-related events include:
There exist WikiNodes &mdash; pages on wikis describing related wikis. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A ''neighbor'' wiki is simply a wiki that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A ''delegate'' wiki is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.
* ] (2006–2012), an ] on wiki-related topics.
* RegioWikiCamp (2009–2013), a semi-annual unconference on "regiowikis", or wikis on cities and other geographic areas.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://wiki.regiowiki.eu/Main_Page |title=Regiowiki Main Page |publisher=Wiki.regiowiki.eu |access-date=June 20, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090813101324/https://wiki.regiowiki.eu/Main_Page |archive-date=August 13, 2009 |url-status=dead }}</ref>


== See also ==
For those interested in creating their own wiki, there are many publicly available "]s", some of which can also make private, password-protected wikis. , , ], , ], ], ], and are eight such services; more at ].


{{Portal|Internet}}
==Wikis and Content Management Systems==
{{div col}}
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
{{div col end}}


== Notes ==
Wikis have shared, and encouraged, several features with generalized ] (CMS) which are used by enterprises and communities-of-practice. Those looking to compare a CMS with an enterprise wiki should consider these basic features:


{{reflist|group=note}}
# The name of an article is embedded in the hyperlink.
# Articles can be created or edited at anytime by anyone (with certain limitations for protected articles).
# Articles are editable through the web browser.
# Each article provides one-click access to the history/versioning page, which also supports version differencing (“diff”) and retrieving prior versions.
# Each article provides one-click access to a discussion page particular to that article.
# The most recent additions/modifications of articles can be monitored actively or passively.


== References ==
None of these are particular to a wiki, and some have developed independently. Still the concept of a wiki unequivocally refers to this core set of features. Taken together, they fit the ''generative'' nature of the Internet (as scholar Jonathan Zittrain has it), in encouraging each user to help build it. It is yet to be studied whether an enterprise wiki encourages more usage, or leads to more knowledgeable community members, than other content management systems.


{{Reflist}}


=== Sources ===
* {{citation|title=Wiki: Web Collaboration|last=Ebersbach|first= Anja|publisher=]|year=2008|isbn=978-3-540-35150-4}}


== Further reading ==
==Notes==
<references />


{{refbegin}}
==References==
* {{citation|title=Wikipatterns|last=Mader|first=Stewart|publisher=]|year= 2007|isbn=978-0-470-22362-8|url=https://archive.org/details/wikipatternsapra00made}}
*Aigrain, Philippe (2003). . Invited talk at the 16th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, Bled, Slovenia, ] ].
* {{citation|title=Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything| last = Tapscott | first = Don|publisher=Portfolio Hardcover|year=2008|isbn=978-1-59184-193-7| title-link = Mass Collaboration }}
*Aronsson, Lars (2002). . Paper presented at the 6th International ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, ], 2002, Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.
{{refend}}
*Benkler, Yochai (2002). Coase's penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. The Yale Law Journal. v.112, n.3, pp.369&ndash;446.
*Choate, Mark (2006). CMS Watch. April 28, 2006.
*Cunningham, Ward and Leuf, Bo (2001): ]. Quick Collaboration on the Web. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-71499-X.
*Delacroix, Jérôme (2005): Les wikis, espaces de l'intelligence collective, M2 Editions, Paris, ISBN 2-9520514-4-5.
*Ebersbach, Anja, Glaser, Markus and Heigl, Richard (2005): Wiki. Web Collaboration. Springer, ISBN 3-540-25995-3.
*Jansson, Kurt (2002): Lecture at the 19th Chaos Communications Congress (19C3), ], ] Berlin, Germany.
*Klobas, Jane and others (2006): Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration. Oxford, UK, Chandos Publishing, ISBN 1-84334-179-4.
*Lange, Christoph (ed., 2005). . Computer- und Literaturverlag, ISBN 3-936546-28-2.
*Mattison, David (2003). ''Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals'', v. 11, no. 4 (April 2003): 32-48
*Möller, Erik (2003). . Presentation at the Open Cultures conference, June 5 & 6, 2003 Vienna, Austria.
*Möller, Erik (2003). . ''Telepolis'', May 9&ndash;30. Four parts: (i) "Das Wiki-Prinzip", (ii) "Alle gegen Brockhaus", (iii) "Diderots Traumtagebuch", und (iv) "Diesen Artikel bearbeiten".
* (2003). . ] v.29, pp.42&ndash;48.
*Remy, Melanie. (2002). Misplaced Pages: The 💕. Online Information Review. v.26, n.6, p.434
*
*[http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/145-Wikis-in-the-enterprise


==See also== == External links ==
{{sisterlinks|wiki}}
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]
*]


{{sister project links|d=Q171|commons=category:Wiki software|voy=no|mw=wiki|m=no|wikt=wiki|s=no|q=no|b=no}}
==External links==
{{Spoken Misplaced Pages|En-Wiki2.ogg|date=2007-03-14}}
<!-- Please do not add links to wikis to this list, instead create new, internal pages about them, and link them to those in the above wiki community list. Please also keep this list alphabetized. -->
* , an interview with Ward Cunningham
*
* Murphy, Paula (April 2006). . ].
* at ].
*
* &mdash; ] article
* ] and , directories of wikis
*
* , a website for comparing wiki software and hosts
* based on
* {{GitHub |WikiTeam/wikiteam}}
*
*
* (on ]) &mdash; help write the book on starting a wiki
* (the first wiki)
* article discussing the role of "enterprise" wikis in capturing and managing ]
* on wikis and the scientific community, from Nature magazine
* is a community of convergent polls.
*
* is a collaborative film writing wiki
*: A side-by-side comparison of many different wiki installations.
*
* - Open source, self-contained single wiki file (JavaScript, DHTML), currently (2006.05.06) works on Firefox and MS-IE (Alpha).
* Book abstract


{{Wiki topics|state=expanded}}
]
{{Wiki software}}
]
{{Computer-mediated communication}}
]
{{Sharing economy}}


{{Link FA|tl}} {{Authority control}}


]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]

Latest revision as of 16:15, 25 December 2024

Type of website that anyone can can edit

This article is about the concept. For its use as a nickname, see Misplaced Pages. For other uses, see Wiki (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Wiiki or WIKY.

refer to caption
Editing display showing MediaWiki markup language

A wiki (/ˈwɪki/ WICK-ee) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

A photo of the MediaWiki homepage, a wiki software

Wikis are powered by wiki software, also known as wiki engines. Being a form of content management system, these differ from other web-based systems such as blog software or static site generators in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader. Wikis have little inherent structure, allowing one to emerge according to the needs of the users. Wiki engines usually allow content to be written using a lightweight markup language and sometimes edited with the help of a rich-text editor. There are dozens of different wiki engines in use, both standalone and part of other software, such as bug tracking systems. Some wiki engines are free and open-source, whereas others are proprietary. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access); for example, editing rights may permit changing, adding, or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Further rules may be imposed to organize content. In addition to hosting user-authored content, wikis allow those users to interact, hold discussions, and collaborate.

There are hundreds of thousands of wikis in use, both public and private, including wikis functioning as knowledge management resources, note-taking tools, community websites, and intranets. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". "Wiki" (pronounced [wiki]) is a Hawaiian word meaning "quick".

The online encyclopedia project Misplaced Pages is the most popular wiki-based website, as well being one of the internet's most popular websites, having been ranked consistently as such since at least 2007. Misplaced Pages is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, with each one pertaining to a specific language. The English-language Misplaced Pages has the largest collection of articles, standing at 6,930,433 as of December 2024.

Characteristics

Ward Cunningham

In their 2001 book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, Cunningham and co-author Bo Leuf described the essence of the wiki concept:

  • "A wiki invites all users—not just experts—to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki website, using only a standard 'plain-vanilla' Web browser without any extra add-ons."
  • "Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not."
  • "A wiki is not a carefully crafted site created by experts and professional writers and designed for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the typical visitor/user in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape."

Editing

"Wikitext" redirects here. For the Misplaced Pages help page, see Help:Wikitext.

Source editing

Some wikis will present users with an edit button or link directly on the page being viewed. This will open an interface for writing, formatting, and structuring page content. The interface may be a source editor, which is text-based and employs a lightweight markup language (also known as wikitext, wiki markup, or wikicode), or a visual editor. For example, in a source editor, starting lines of text with asterisks could create a bulleted list.

The syntax and features of wiki markup languages for denoting style and structure can vary greatly among implementations. Some allow the use of HTMLTooltip Hypertext Markup Language and CSSTooltip Cascading Style Sheets, while others prevent the use of these to foster uniformity in appearance.

Example of syntax

A short section of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland rendered in wiki markup:

Wiki markup Equivalent in HTML Output shown to readers
"Take some more ]," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had '''nothing''' yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take ''less''," said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take ''more'' than nothing."
"Take some more <a href="/Tea" title="Tea">tea</a>," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
<p>"I've had <strong>nothing</strong> yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
<p>"You mean you can't take <em>less</em>," said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take <em>more</em> than nothing."

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take more than nothing."

Visual editing

While wiki engines have traditionally offered source editing to users, in recent years some implementations have added a rich text editing mode. This is usually implemented, using JavaScript, as an interface which translates formatting instructions chosen from a toolbar into the corresponding wiki markup or HTML. This is generated and submitted to the server transparently, shielding users from the technical detail of markup editing and making it easier for them to change the content of pages. An example of such an interface is the VisualEditor in MediaWiki, the wiki engine used by Misplaced Pages. WYSIWYG editors may not provide all the features available in wiki markup, and some users prefer not to use them, so a source editor will often be available simultaneously.

Version history

Some wiki implementations keep a record of changes made to wiki pages, and may store every version of the page permanently. This allows authors to revert a page to an older version to rectify a mistake, or counteract a malicious or inappropriate edit to its content.

These stores are typically presented for each page in a list, called a "log" or "edit history", available from the page via a link in the interface. The list displays metadata for each revision to the page, such as the time and date of when it was stored, and the name of the person who created it, alongside a link to view that specific revision. A diff (short for "difference") feature may be available, which highlights the changes between any two revisions.

Edit summaries

"Edit summary" redirects here. For the Misplaced Pages help page, see Help:Edit summary.

The edit history view in many wiki implementations will include edit summaries written by users when submitting changes to a page. Similar to the function of a log message in a revision control system, an edit summary is a short piece of text which summarizes and perhaps explains the change, for example "Corrected grammar" or "Fixed table formatting to not extend past page width". It is not inserted into the article's main text.

Navigation

Traditionally, wikis offer free navigation between their pages via hypertext links in page text, rather than requiring users to follow a formal or structured navigation scheme. Users may also create indexes or table of contents pages, hierarchical categorization via a taxonomy, or other forms of ad hoc content organization. Wiki implementations can provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages, such as a backlink feature which displays all pages that link to a given page. Adding categories or tags to a page makes it easier for other users to find it.

Most wikis allow the titles of pages to be searched amongst, and some offer full text search of all stored content.

Navigation between wikis

Visualization of the collaborative work in the German wiki project Mathe für Nicht-Freaks
"WikiNode" redirects here. For the app for the Apple iPad, see WikiNodes.

Some wiki communities have established navigational networks between each other using a system called WikiNodes. A WikiNode is a page on a wiki which describes and links to other, related wikis. Some wikis operate a structure of neighbors and delegates, wherein a neighbor wiki is one which discusses similar content or is otherwise of interest, and a delegate wiki is one which has agreed to have certain content delegated to it. WikiNode networks act as webrings which may be navigated from one node to another to find a wiki which addresses a specific subject.

Linking to and naming pages

The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations. Beginning with the WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used camel case to name pages, which is when words in a phrase are capitalized and the spaces between them removed. In this system, the phrase "camel case" would be rendered as "CamelCase". In early wiki engines, when a page was displayed, any instance of a camel case phrase would be transformed into a link to another page named with the same phrase.

While this system made it easy to link to pages, it had the downside of requiring pages to be named in a form deviating from standard spelling, and titles of a single word required abnormally capitalizing one of the letters (e.g. "WiKi" instead of "Wiki"). Some wiki implementations attempt to improve the display of camel case page titles and links by reinserting spaces and possibly also reverting to lower case, but this simplistic method is not able to correctly present titles of mixed capitalization. For example, "Kingdom of France" as a page title would be written as "KingdomOfFrance", and displayed as "Kingdom Of France".

To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained free links, wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. The concept was given the name in its first implementation, in UseModWiki in February 2001. In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example ]. This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.

It is typically possible for users of a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite the creation of those pages. Such links are usually differentiated visually in some fashion, such as being colored red instead of the default blue, which was the case in the original WikiWikiWeb, or by appearing as a question mark next to the linked words.

History

Main article: History of wikis
Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport

WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing it in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. Cunningham gave it the name after remembering a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" bus that runs between the airport's terminals, later observing that "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."

Cunningham's system was inspired by his having used Apple's hypertext software HyperCard, which allowed users to create interlinked "stacks" of virtual cards. HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of Vannevar Bush, the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text." Cunningham says his goals were to link together people's experiences to create a new literature to document programming patterns, and to harness people's natural desire to talk and tell stories with a technology that would feel comfortable to those not used to "authoring".

Misplaced Pages became the most famous wiki site, launched in January 2001 and entering the top ten most popular websites in 2007. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Some companies use wikis as their collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning. On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

Alternative definitions

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the word "wiki" was used to refer to both user-editable websites and the software that powers them, and the latter definition is still occasionally in use.

By 2014, Ward Cunningham's thinking on the nature of wikis had evolved, leading him to write that the word "wiki" should not be used to refer to a single website, but rather to a mass of user-editable pages or sites so that a single website is not "a wiki" but "an instance of wiki". In this concept of wiki federation, in which the same content can be hosted and edited in more than one location in a manner similar to distributed version control, the idea of a single discrete "wiki" no longer made sense.

Implementations

See also: List of wiki software

The software which powers a wiki may be implemented as a series of scripts which operate an existing web server, a standalone application server that runs on one or more web servers, or in the case of personal wikis, run as a standalone application on a single computer. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page content, while others use a relational database, as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching.

Hosting

See also: Comparison of wiki hosting services

Wikis can also be created on wiki hosting services (also known as wiki farms), where the server-side software is implemented by the wiki farm owner, and may do so at no charge in exchange for advertisements being displayed on the wiki's pages. Some hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis requiring authentication to access. Free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page.

Trust and security

Access control

The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. System administrators are responsible for the installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. Wiki administrators maintain content and, through having elevated privileges, are granted additional functions (including, for example, preventing edits to pages, deleting pages, changing users' access rights, or blocking them from editing).

Controlling changes

"Recent changes" redirects here. For the Misplaced Pages help page, see Help:Recent changes. For the recent changes page itself, see Special:RecentChanges.
History comparison reports highlight the changes between two revisions of a page.

Wikis are generally designed with a soft security philosophy in which it is easy to correct mistakes or harmful changes, rather than attempting to prevent them from happening in the first place. This allows them to be very open while providing a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. Most wikis offer a recent changes page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame. Some wikis can filter the list to remove edits flagged by users as "minor" and automated edits. The version history feature allows harmful changes to be reverted quickly and easily.

Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of pages to maintain quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be alerted of modifications to them, allowing them to verify the validity of new editions quickly. Such a feature is often called a watchlist.

Some wikis also implement patrolled revisions, in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate. A flagged revisions system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed.

Wikis may allow any person on the web to edit their content without having to register an account on the site first (anonymous editing), or require registration as a condition of participation. On implementations where an administrator is able to restrict editing of a page or group of pages to a specific group of users, they may have the option to prevent anonymous editing while allowing it for registered users.

Trustworthiness and reliability of content

Critics of publicly editable wikis argue that they could be easily tampered with by malicious individuals, or even by well-meaning but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content. Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified by a wiki's community of users. High editorial standards in medicine and health sciences articles, in which users typically use peer-reviewed journals or university textbooks as sources, have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis. Wiki implementations retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert peer reviewers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they have analyzed.

Security

"Edit war" redirects here. Not to be confused with Edit conflict. For Misplaced Pages's policy on edit warring, see Misplaced Pages:Edit warring.

Trolling and cybervandalism on wikis, where content is changed to something deliberately incorrect or a hoax, offensive material or nonsense is added, or content is maliciously removed, can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites it is possible for such changes to go unnoticed for a long period.

In addition to using the approach of soft security for protecting themselves, larger wikis may employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism. For example, on Misplaced Pages, the bot ClueBot NG uses machine learning to identify likely harmful changes, and reverts these changes within minutes or even seconds.

Disagreements between users over the content or appearance of pages may cause edit wars, where competing users repetitively change a page back to a version that they favor. Some wiki software allows administrators to prevent pages from being editable until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate.

Some wikis may be subject to external structures of governance which address the behavior of persons with access to the system, for example in academic contexts.

Harmful external links

As most wikis allow the creation of hyperlinks to other sites and services, the addition of malicious hyperlinks, such as sites infected with malware, can also be a problem. For example, in 2006 a German Misplaced Pages article about the Blaster Worm was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website, and users of vulnerable Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link had their systems infected with the worm. Some wiki engines offer a blacklist feature which prevents users from adding hyperlinks to specific sites that have been placed on the list by the wiki's administrators.

Communities

Applications

The home page of the English Misplaced Pages

The English Misplaced Pages has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic. Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Memory Alpha, Wikivoyage, and previously Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base. Medical and health-related wiki examples include Ganfyd, an online collaborative medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. Many wiki communities are private, particularly within enterprises. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to help produce software documentation. A study of corporate wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work. From a study of thousands of wiki deployments, Jonathan Grudin concluded careful stakeholder analysis and education are crucial to successful wiki deployment.

In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. Wikis can be used for project management. Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend among industries toward collaboration placed a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.

Wikis have found some use within the legal profession and within the government. Examples include the Central Intelligence Agency's Intellipedia, designed to share and collect intelligence assessments, DKosopedia, which was used by the American Civil Liberties Union to assist with review of documents about the internment of detainees in Guantánamo Bay; and the wiki of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, used to post court rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The United States Patent and Trademark Office operates Peer-to-Patent, a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to the examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. Cornell Law School founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called Wex, whose growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit.

In academic contexts, wikis have also been used as project collaboration and research support systems.

City wikis

A city wiki or local wiki is a wiki used as a knowledge base and social network for a specific geographical locale. The term city wiki is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. Such a wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. Such highly localized information might be appropriate for a wiki targeted at local viewers, and could include:

  • Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centers
  • Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop
  • Statistical information about a specific road in a city
  • Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor
  • A biography of a local mayor and other persons

Growth factors

A study of several hundred wikis in 2008 showed that a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth; access controls restricting editing to registered users tends to reduce growth; a lack of such access controls tends to fuel new user registration; and that a higher ratio of administrators to regular users has no significant effect on content or population growth.

Legal environment

Joint authorship of articles, in which different users participate in correcting, editing, and compiling the finished product, can also cause editors to become tenants in common of the copyright, making it impossible to republish without permission of all co-owners, some of whose identities may be unknown due to pseudonymous or anonymous editing. Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an open content license. Version 2 of the GNU Free Documentation License includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing, and Creative Commons licenses are also popular. When no license is specified, an implied license to read and add content to a wiki may be deemed to exist on the grounds of business necessity and the inherent nature of a wiki.

Wikis and their users can be held liable for certain activities that occur on the wiki. If a wiki owner displays indifference and forgoes controls (such as banning copyright infringers) that they could have exercised to stop copyright infringement, they may be deemed to have authorized infringement, especially if the wiki is primarily used to infringe copyrights or obtains a direct financial benefit, such as advertising revenue, from infringing activities. In the United States, wikis may benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects sites that engage in "Good Samaritan" policing of harmful material, with no requirement on the quality or quantity of such self-policing. It has also been argued that a wiki's enforcement of certain rules, such as anti-bias, verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no-original-research policies, could pose legal risks. When defamation occurs on a wiki, theoretically, all users of the wiki can be held liable, because any of them had the ability to remove or amend the defamatory material from the "publication". It remains to be seen whether wikis will be regarded as more akin to an internet service provider, which is generally not held liable due to its lack of control over publications' contents, than a publisher. It has been recommended that trademark owners monitor what information is presented about their trademarks on wikis, since courts may use such content as evidence pertaining to public perceptions, and they can edit entries to rectify misinformation.

Conferences

Active conferences and meetings about wiki-related topics include:

Former wiki-related events include:

  • RecentChangesCamp (2006–2012), an unconference on wiki-related topics.
  • RegioWikiCamp (2009–2013), a semi-annual unconference on "regiowikis", or wikis on cities and other geographic areas.

See also

Notes

  1. The realization of the Hawaiian /w/ phoneme varies between and , and the realization of the /k/ phoneme varies between and , among other realizations. Thus, the pronunciation of the Hawaiian word wiki varies between , , , and . See Hawaiian phonology for more details.

References

  1. ^ Mitchell, Scott (July 2008), Easy Wiki Hosting, Scott Hanselman's blog, and Snagging Screens, MSDN Magazine, archived from the original on March 16, 2010, retrieved March 9, 2010
  2. ^ "wiki", Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 1, London: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2007, archived from the original on April 24, 2008, retrieved April 10, 2008
  3. ^ Black, Peter; Delaney, Hayden; Fitzgerald, Brian (2007), Legal Issues for Wikis: The Challenge of User-generated and Peer-produced Knowledge, Content and Culture (PDF), vol. 14, eLaw J., archived from the original (PDF) on December 22, 2012
  4. Cunningham, Ward (June 27, 2002). "What is a Wiki". WikiWikiWeb. Archived from the original on April 16, 2008. Retrieved April 10, 2008.
  5. "Hawaiian Words; Hawaiian to English". mauimapp.com. Archived from the original on September 14, 2008. Retrieved September 19, 2008.
  6. Hasan, Heather (2012), Misplaced Pages, 3.5 million articles and counting, New York : Rosen Central, p. 11, ISBN 9781448855575, archived from the original on October 26, 2019, retrieved August 6, 2019
  7. Andrews, Lorrin (1865), A dictionary of the Hawaiian language to which is appended an English-Hawaiian vocabulary and a chronological table of remarkable events, Henry M. Whitney, p. 514, archived from the original on August 15, 2014, retrieved June 1, 2014
  8. "Alexa Top Sites". Archived from the original on March 2, 2015. Retrieved December 1, 2016.
  9. "Misplaced Pages:Size of Misplaced Pages". Misplaced Pages. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved January 14, 2024.
  10. Leuf, Bo; Cunningham, Ward (2001). The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web. Addison-Wesley. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-201-71499-9.
  11. "Wiki Design Principles". Archived from the original on April 30, 2002. Retrieved April 30, 2002.
  12. Dohrn, Hannes; Riehle, Dirk (2011). "Design and implementation of the Sweble Wikitext parser: Unlocking the structured data of Misplaced Pages". Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. ACM. pp. 72–81. doi:10.1145/2038558.2038571. ISBN 978-1-4503-0909-7.
  13. ^ Ebersbach 2008, p. 178
  14. "Frequently Asked Questions". WikiNodes. Archived from the original on August 10, 2007.
  15. Bäckström, A., & Wändin, L. (2005). Spatial Hypertext Editing Tools for Wiki Web Systems.
  16. Adams, Clifford (April 26, 2001). "UseModWiki/OldVersions". Retrieved July 25, 2024.
  17. ^ Ebersbach 2008, p. 10
  18. Cunningham, Ward (November 1, 2003). "Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki". WikiWikiWeb. Archived from the original on March 17, 2007. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  19. Cunningham, Ward (February 25, 2008). "Wiki History". WikiWikiWeb. Archived from the original on June 21, 2002. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  20. ^ Bill Venners (October 20, 2003). "Exploring with Wiki: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part I". artima developer. Archived from the original on February 5, 2015. Retrieved December 12, 2014.
  21. Cunningham, Ward (July 26, 2007). "Wiki Wiki Hyper Card". WikiWikiWeb. Archived from the original on April 6, 2007. Retrieved March 9, 2007.
  22. Diamond, Graeme (March 1, 2007). "March 2007 update". Oxford English Dictionary. Archived from the original on January 7, 2011. Retrieved March 16, 2007.
  23. Ward Cunningham (November 8, 2014). "The plural of wiki is wiki. See https://forage.ward.fed.wiki.org/an-install-of-wiki.html" (Tweet). Retrieved March 18, 2019 – via Twitter.
  24. "Smallest Federated Wiki". wiki.org. Archived from the original on September 28, 2015. Retrieved September 28, 2015.
  25. ^ Naomi, Augar; Raitman, Ruth; Zhou, Wanlei (2004). "Teaching and learning online with wikis". Proceedings of Beyond the Comfort Zone: 21st ASCILITE Conference: 95–104. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.133.1456.
  26. Cubric, Marija (2007). "Analysis of the use of Wiki-based collaborations in enhancing student learning". UH Business School Working Paper. University of Hertfordshire. Archived from the original on May 15, 2011. Retrieved April 25, 2011.
  27. Ebersbach 2008, p. 20
  28. Ebersbach 2008, p. 54
  29. Ebersbach 2008, p. 109
  30. Goldman, Eric, "Misplaced Pages's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences", Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 8
  31. Ebersbach 2008, p. 108
  32. ^ Noveck, Beth Simone (March 2007), "Misplaced Pages and the Future of Legal Education", Journal of Legal Education, 57 (1), archived from the original on July 3, 2014(subscription required)
  33. Barsky, Eugene; Giustini, Dean (December 2007). "Introducing Web 2.0: wikis for health librarians" (PDF). Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association. 28 (4): 147–150. doi:10.5596/c07-036. ISSN 1708-6892. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 30, 2012. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
  34. Yager, Kevin (March 16, 2006). "Wiki ware could harness the Internet for science". Nature. 440 (7082): 278. Bibcode:2006Natur.440..278Y. doi:10.1038/440278a. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 16541049.
  35. Hicks, Jesse (February 18, 2014). "This machine kills trolls". The Verge. Archived from the original on August 27, 2014. Retrieved September 7, 2014.
  36. "List of largest (Media)wikis". S23-Wiki. April 3, 2008. Archived from the original on August 25, 2014. Retrieved December 12, 2014.
  37. "Alexa Top 500 Global Sites". Alexa Internet. Archived from the original on March 2, 2015. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
  38. Boulos, M. N. K.; Maramba, I.; Wheeler, S. (2006), "Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education", BMC Medical Education, 6: 41, doi:10.1186/1472-6920-6-41, PMC 1564136, PMID 16911779
  39. Müller, C.; Birn, L. (September 6–8, 2006). "Wikis for Collaborative Software Documentation" (PDF). i-know.tugraz.at. Proceedings of I-KNOW '06. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 6, 2011.
  40. Majchrzak, A.; Wagner, C.; Yates, D. (2006), "Corporate wiki users: results of a survey", Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis, Symposium on Wikis, pp. 99–104, doi:10.1145/1149453.1149472, ISBN 978-1-59593-413-0, S2CID 13206858
  41. Grudin, Jonathan; Poole, Erika Shehan (2015). "Wikis at work: Success factors and challenges for sustainability of enterprise wikis". Microsoft Research. Archived from the original on September 4, 2015. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  42. Conlin, Michelle (November 28, 2005), "E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago", Bloomberg BusinessWeek, archived from the original on October 17, 2012
  43. "HomePage". Project Management Wiki.org. Archived from the original on August 16, 2014. Retrieved May 8, 2012.
  44. "Ways to Wiki: Project Management". EditMe. January 4, 2010. Archived from the original on May 8, 2012.
  45. Wanderley, M. M.; Birnbaum, D.; Malloch, J. (2006). "SensorWiki.org: a collaborative resource for researchers and interface designers". NIME '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. IRCAM – Centre Pompidou: 180–183. ISBN 978-2-84426-314-8.
  46. Lombardo, Nancy T. (June 2008). "Putting Wikis to Work in Libraries". Medical Reference Services Quarterly. 27 (2): 129–145. doi:10.1080/02763860802114223. PMID 18844087. S2CID 11552140.
  47. Noveck, Beth Simone (2007). "Misplaced Pages and the Future of Legal Education". Journal of Legal Education. 57: 3.
  48. Au, C. H. (December 2017). "Wiki as a research support system – A trial in information systems research". 2017 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM). pp. 2271–2275. doi:10.1109/IEEM.2017.8290296. ISBN 978-1-5386-0948-4. S2CID 44029462.
  49. Au, Cheuk-hang. "Using Wiki for Project Collaboration – with Comparison on Facebook" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on April 12, 2019.
  50. Andersen, Michael (November 6, 2009). "Welcome to Davis, Calif.: Six lessons from the world's best local wiki". Nieman Lab. Archived from the original on August 8, 2013. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  51. McGann, Laura (June 18, 2010). "Knight News Challenge: Is a wiki site coming to your city? Local Wiki will build software to make it simple". Nieman Lab. Archived from the original on June 25, 2013. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  52. Wired: Makice, Kevin (July 15, 2009). Hey, Kid: Support Your Local Wiki Archived April 27, 2015, at the Wayback Machine
  53. Roth, C.; Taraborelli, D.; Gilbert, N. (2008). "Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis" (PDF). nitens.org. The Centre for Research in Social Simulation: 3. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 11, 2017. Figure 4 shows that having a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth.
  54. Roth, C.; Taraborelli, D.; Gilbert, N. (2008). "Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis" (PDF). Surrey Research Insight Open Access. The Centre for Research in Social Simulation. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 16, 2012. Retrieved November 9, 2018.
  55. Walsh, Kathleen M.; Oh, Sarah (February 23, 2010). "Self-Regulation: How Misplaced Pages Leverages User-Generated Quality Control Under Section 230". Archived from the original on January 6, 2014.
  56. Myers, Ken S. (2008), "Wikimmunity: Fitting the Communications Decency Act to Misplaced Pages", Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 20, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society: 163, SSRN 916529, archived from the original on January 24, 2024
  57. Jarvis, Joshua (May 2008), "Police your marks in a wiki world", Managing Intellectual Property, 179 (179): 101–103, archived from the original on March 4, 2016
  58. "Atlassian". Summit.atlassian.com. Archived from the original on June 13, 2011. Retrieved June 20, 2011.
  59. "SMWCon". Semantic-mediawiki.org. Archived from the original on July 14, 2011. Retrieved June 20, 2011.
  60. "TikiFest". Tiki.org. Archived from the original on June 30, 2011. Retrieved June 20, 2011.
  61. "Regiowiki Main Page". Wiki.regiowiki.eu. Archived from the original on August 13, 2009. Retrieved June 20, 2011.

Sources

Further reading

External links

Listen to this article (16 minutes)
Spoken Misplaced Pages iconThis audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 14 March 2007 (2007-03-14), and does not reflect subsequent edits.(Audio help · More spoken articles)
Wikis
Types
Components
Lists
Comparisons
Notable wikis
Wiki farms
See also
Wiki software
.NET
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Other languages
Computer-mediated communication
Asynchronous conferencing
Synchronous conferencing
Publishing
Sharing economy
Concepts
Social peer-to-peer processes
Companies
Transportation
Hospitality exchange services
Swap and renting
Categories: