Wiki

**Wiki**-
//A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects.// [|What is a Wiki you ask? click here to find out]

> It might be difficult to imagine a simple product that does everything I describe. So why not try it for yourself? Start out on your own computer; you don't even need to install a Web server in order to play with a wiki. [|Notebook], which acts like a personal wiki for keeping track of notes and other ideas, runs as a regular computer application, and is available on multiple operating systems. It's great for managing your brain.
 * A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. ...
 * Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or wiki application) is software that runs a wiki, or a website that allows users to collaboratively create and edit web pages using a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers
 * Historical Note. The first ever wiki site was created for the Portland Pattern Repository in 1995. That site now hosts tens of thousands of pages.
 * **Creating New Pages Is Simple With Wikis:** Wikis let you link to pages that don't yet exist. Click on a link that points to a nonexistent page, and the wiki will ask you for initial content to put in the page. If you submit some initial content, the wiki will create the page. All links to that page (not just the one you clicked) will now point to the newly-created page.
 * **Wikis Simplify Site Organization:** As wikis work like hypertext databases, you can organize your page however you want. Many content management systems require you to plan classifications for your content before you actually create it. This can be helpful, but only if what you want to convey fits a rigid mould. With a wiki, you can organize your page into categories if you want, but you can also try other things. Instead of designing the site structure, many wiki site creators just let the structure grow with the content and the links inside their content. But you don't have to have it either way. I do all three on my own site. Visitors can navigate the site by following a storyline, drilling down through a hierarchy, or they can just browse with the natural flow of the internal links. Without the wiki, such complexity would be a nightmare. Now that I use a wiki, I also find my site structure easier to manage than when I used a template system and a set of categories.
 * **Wikis Keep Track of All Your Stuff:** Because a wiki stores everything in an internal hypertext database, it knows about all your links and all your pages. So it's easy for the wiki to show back links, a list of all the pages that linking to the current page. Since the wiki stores your document history, it can also list recent changes. Advanced wikis like the [|Wikipedia]can even show a list of recent changes to pages that link to the current page.
 * **Many Wikis are Collaborative Communities:** The original wiki allows anyone to click the Edit button and change the Website. While this may seem odd, many wikis are able to do this successfully without major issues in terms of vandalism. Remember, the wiki stores the history of each page. For each vandal, there are probably ten people who actually need the information that was there before, and who will take the time to click the button and reset the page to its former contents. Many of the wikis handle this challenge differently. Some are completely open, some restrict access, and one even has a democratic error/vandalism reporting system. How you deal with this challenge depends on what you plan to use the Wiki for, as we'll see.
 * **Wikis Encourage Good Hypertext:** In my recent article, [|Caffeinate Your Hypertext], I wrote that wikis are the purest form of hypertext available on the Web today. Many wikis sport features that make hypertext geeks drool, but the features aren't the real reason wikis make great hypertext tools. They succeed because they make writing hypertext elegantly and easy. Effective Wiki writers don't have to be geeks. They just need to be able to type.

__//** K. Brown **//__

__//** R. Leiner **//__


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