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.
The revision history is what makes the rest safe. If any change can be reversed in one click, the cost of a bad edit is low and the cost of an unnecessary restriction is high — so the default can be openness.
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.