Introduction

What is a Wiki?

A Wiki is an online collaborative information system infrastructure in which a community of users, or small groups, can create content, edit it, and make this content available to a large audience. 

In today’s digital world, Wikis are widely used to support the collaborative construction of large general encyclopaedias (e.g. Wikipedia), the knowledge sharing of small groups or communities working on a specialised topic, or the collaborative authoring of documents.

On the technical side, Wikis are based on a Wiki software component that allows users to very easily create, edit, and link Web page using a standard Web browser. Single pages in a Wiki are referred to as a “Wiki page”, while the entire body of pages, which are usually highly interconnected, is called “the Wiki”. The editing of the Wiki is based on the use of a simple markup language in which an editor can easily specify the formatting (such as headings, bullets and so on) of Wiki pages, and also to hyperlink them with one another via the terms included in this page. Wikis also usually offer other functionalities for facilitating the coordination of different authors such as: locking the content of pages under edition; content versioning and history (the system archives the different version of the Wiki page); discussion pages (a Wiki page may have an associated page for discussion); and so on.

On the non technical side, Wikis propose a set of principles, processes and guidelines that can be used to regulate and coordinate the knowledge authoring and diffusion process in the community of the users making use of these Wikis. For instance, many Wikis (such as Wikipedia) rely on the concept of public and open source content, in which everybody is allowed to create or update the Wiki pages, and to make use of this content in various contexts (subject to proper citation of the author). In some other cases, more restricted Wiki can exist, in which access is restricted to a particular group, or for which you need to authenticate before publishing. The processes and guidelines include the description of the different practices (such as style policies, templates, etc.) to be used to create high quality content, or to address issues that can occur in collaborative authoring contexts (such as correcting errors, disambiguating terms, resolving disputes, or addressing vandalism).

 

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