By Kelvin Kong, Expert Author

“Wiki” is Hawaiian for quick. Ward Cunningham wanted to share his ideas with colleagues easily over the internet, so he started the Portland Pattern Repository.

His idea was to be able to share information and ideas with people over the internet, quickly and easily, using the same technology software engineers had been using to “build” their releases (a “repository” is just a more technical kind of wiki). Ward realized that using wiki to edit text would be different from using “repositories” to edit code, even if the technology were nearly the same. In code, namespaces are very carefully managed and controlled. In most writing, though, it’s not controlled.

Ward knew that there would be thousands, maybe millions, of other pages to link to, not just a few dozen. His big improvement was to make it much easier to link to internal pages than by using HTML “A” links. Instead, users could write links by CamelCase (sometimes referred to as WikiLinks) and more recently like [[this]]. Today, hundreds of thousands of people create wiki pages, which anyone can do.

As such, wiki is a software program that fosters collaboration and openness – anyone may add, edit and even delete entries, regardless of expertise in a given subject. It is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. The platform supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly. In Ward’s original description, a wiki is “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself. Like many simple concepts, “open editing” has some profound and subtle effects on wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

ADVANTAGES

“Content is King” on the Internet! The success of Wikipedia.org has demonstrated the potential of using wiki-type platforms. As a Content Management System (CMS), the wiki engine is excellent! It is user-friendly, easy to grasp, perfect for content generation, easy to maintain and moderate. You do not require knowledge of HTML or other programming languages to run your own wiki effectively. As a collaborative platform, it allows anyone with internet access anywhere in the world to view and contribute content anytime.

From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, a wiki is also very effective in getting your content pages listed by the search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.

DISADVANTAGES

A wiki has been designed in a way to make content generation as simple as possible. As such, more complicated and “out-of-the-ordinary” usages may not be supported by the platform.

SETTING UP

You can obtain the MediaWiki engine from WikiMedia, thereafter program it yourself or hire someone to program one.

These days, some organizations promoting the use of the wiki platform even offer free wiki websites if you sign-up with them. An example of which would be a Wyfee, found at http://www.wyfee.com.

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