Wiki
 Editing a page directly in the browser | |
| First example | WikiWikiWeb, 25 March 1995 |
|---|---|
| Created by | Ward Cunningham |
| Named after | Hawaiian wiki wiki, "quick" |
| Defining feature | Any reader can edit any page |
A wiki is a website whose pages can be created and edited by its readers, directly in the browser, using a simplified markup language. The defining choice is that editing is open by default and review happens after publication rather than before.
Origin
[edit]Ward Cunningham built the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, and opened it on 25 March 1995 as a place for programmers to record design patterns. He named it after the Wiki Wiki shuttle buses at Honolulu airport; wiki wiki is Hawaiian for "quick". Speed was the point: Cunningham wanted the gap between noticing that a page was wrong and fixing it to be as close to zero as possible.[1]
How a wiki works
[edit]Four mechanisms, taken together, make open editing survivable:
- Edit anywhere
- Every page has an edit view containing its source. There is no separate authoring tool and no publishing step.
- Simplified markup
- Wikitext keeps the source readable, so a page can be edited by someone who does not write HTML.
- Complete revision history
- Every save is stored as a new revision. Nothing is overwritten, so any change can be inspected, compared and undone.
- Links to pages that do not exist
- Writing a link to a missing page creates a request for it. Following the link opens an empty editor. Articles grow outward from red links.
Because any change can be reversed from the history, a bad edit costs little to correct. Wikis rely on this to keep editing open by default.
Structure
[edit]Wikis are organised by linking rather than by hierarchy. There is no fixed tree of folders; a page belongs wherever other pages point at it. Two conventions supplement this: categories, which tag pages by subject and generate an index, and namespaces, which separate content from the discussion and administration around it. On this site, Help: pages hold instructions, Template: pages hold reusable fragments and Special: pages are generated by the software. Discussion is deliberately not a namespace here: it is a separate system of posted messages rather than pages that everyone edits.
Uses
[edit]Public encyclopedias are the most visible application, but the pattern is general. Wikis are used for software documentation, internal company knowledge bases, project planning and note-taking. The trade-off is consistent everywhere: a wiki lowers the cost of contribution and raises the cost of maintaining consistency, which suits work where getting information written down at all is the hard part.
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Leuf, Bo and Cunningham, Ward. The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web. Addison-Wesley, 2001.