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WikiMainia

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 1 month ago

What are Wikis? - By Ryan Singe

 

Also see :

Digital Collaboration http://minnesotafuturists.pbwiki.com/Digital-Collaboration

 

Sept 07, 2006

 

Wikipedia has edited its way into the big time.

 

The massive user-driven site is now the biggest encyclopedia in the world. The mainstream media covers it extensively. It was recently lampooned by The Onion and Comedy Central. Soon, Wikipedia may also become familiar to thousands of people without internet access -- selected articles from its extensive database will come pre-packaged with MIT's $100 laptop project.

 

But is there a future for wikis other than the encyclopedia model, or will open collaboration be the exception, not the rule?

 

Ward Cunningham, the father of wiki software, posed that question when he argued that wikis have only touched the surface of what is possible. Cunningham wrote and launched the first wiki, called WikiWikiWeb, in 1995 to help programmers share their techniques.

 

"Our vision of the web is more than a shopping mall, and wiki stands out there as shopping mall-not," Cunningham said. "The creativity that is possible in the worldwide network of computers far exceeds what wiki has done. How much work is it going to take to make the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) wiki universal, but somehow doing it universally hasn't happened. Part of it was there was (a) browser war (that) happened in there sometime and the opportunity to do it right was lost."

 

"We should be outraged that that little bit of future has not arrived, but I don't think they can spoil it forever," Cunningham concludes.

Wikipedia is not alone

 

Wikipedia is far from the only wiki. Several different wiki engines power hundreds of thousands of wikis across the internet. These wikis serve a variety of different communities. Wikis now cover a range of niche topics, from Wikitravel for the tourist, ArmchairGM for the sports enthusiast, wikiHow for general how-to advice and the TaxAlmanac for those needing help with their taxes.

 

Wikis are also tackling politics. For instance, U.S. Senate candidate and internet entrepreneur Pete Ashdown launched a campaign wiki in the summer of 2005, as did Kevin Zeese, an Independent running for U.S. Senate. Campaigns Wikia, which started last July, allows people to discuss politics in a collaborative setting.

 

Several companies are trying to cash in on wikis by making it easy for non-techies to start sites allowing quick and easy collaboration. Among them are Jot, Wetpaint, PBwiki, Wikispaces, Wiki.com and Wikia, started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

 

Some of these wikis already allow WYSIWYG editing. "I'd like to see the PTA wiki. We are on the cusp of making the tools simple enough for the Parent Teacher Association," said Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. Socialtext is attempting to make its WYSIWYG click-and-type editor more widespread; at this year's Wikimania conference, Socialtext announced it was working with Wikia and Wikimedia to integrate Wikiwyg into Wikipedia's software.

Wiki while you work

 

Wikis have also invaded the workplace. After programmers introduced wikis to large companies by sneaking them inside the firewall to manage software documentation, some large corporations adopted wikis for other purposes as well. From entire intranets to small group projects, enterprises are utilizing the power of wikis to enable simpler, clearer communication within a corporation.

 

Though they serve the same purpose of collaboration and knowledge sharing, enterprise wikis such as Confluence, Socialtext and TWiki require different functionality than citizen wikis. Enterprise-class features -- such as strong permission schemes, advanced search and user management -- help organizations share information securely. The enterprise wikis TWiki and Jot move beyond the traditional whiteboard sharing mode of a wiki by providing a platform where users can create simple, embedded applications within the wiki itself. These applications support basic business processes within a workplace; employees can track issues and call center status, manage tasks and reserve resources.

 

Wikis with the best technical features can still fail if the organization does not fully embrace their use. However, unlike open consumer wikis, in business they are likely to be used in the conduct of work, on specific projects, by people whose own interests are aligned with that of business. This is especially the case if, after the initial grassroots movement, management fully supports the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, eliminating alternate channels. The answer to almost any question has to be "It's on the wiki." Otherwise, depending on the culture, uninitiated employees may ignore this collaborative tool in favor of old habits.

From Conference to Community

 

Wikis can also help transform conferences into professional communities. For years, tech guru and publisher Tim O'Reilly has invited figures from tech's bleeding edge to Foo Camp a weekend-long get-together. In the months leading up to Foo Camp, participants use a wiki to post profiles, propose sessions, organize rideshares and more. The O'Reilly staff and other campers continue to update the wiki after the event with additional information.

 

Last year, some Web 2.0 young guns decided to both complement and challenge Foo Camp with an open-invitation alternative they cheekily called Bar Camp. Pulled together in just a week, the successful "un-conference" has inspired dozens of subsequent Bar Camps across the world. Each camp began with the same tool: a wiki. Virtual conference attendees focus the wiki on a topic of their choosing, and collaboratively build their own topical e-community. This spontaneous topic format has been described as a real life wiki.

Learning by wiki

 

Wikis are changing the classroom experience. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard and Oxford has been using wikis in his cyberlaw class for two years. "Wikis can be an effective tool for collective learning," says Zittrain. "Students realize that they're in it together, and wiki-style collaboration enables them to work toward a consensus or craft a solution."

 

Vicki Davis agrees. Through her Westwood Schools Wiki, she extends the classroom virtually, by employing a class blog and a wiki. (Davis even gives students awards via the wiki!) The result, says Davis, is "increased engagement" from "an interactive, easy to use tool" at the heart of her classroom.

 

Soon, wikis will affect education on a global scale. Students and educators may be able to collaborate on their own textbooks. The Global Text Project, spearheaded Rick Watson of the University of Georgia, hopes to create a library of 1,000 student-created and faculty edited textbooks that will be made available to students around the world. Another portal, Beth Ritter-Guth's College English Wiki, will allow educators of all levels to write educational resources for their colleagues.

The wiki effect

 

A larger pattern can be observed from the use of wikis -- sharing control to create value. The wiki metaphor has extended to other kinds of software, including desktop publishing and video games. Second Life -- the popular online world where users inhabit alternate personas, buy land and build houses -- is in its own way a wiki, according to Yoz Grahame. Grahame is a Developer Advocate for Ning, a startup that helps users create and share their own web applications and content.

 

Both Second Life and Ning "hand over a huge amount of building control to their users, not just to create objects, but to program these objects," Grahame said. "If you let users take control of objects that are operating in this shared environment and which can work with other people's code as well, that's where you get exponential laws taking off."

When wikis fail

 

Although wikis have been rapidly expanding, creating a successful wiki takes work.

 

Some wikis have been spectacular failures. Take, for example, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to allow users to edit editorials on a wiki in 2005, termed the "wikitorial." Only days later, they shuttered the attempt after witnessing what happened when users attempted to co-write an editorial on the Iraq war. Recently, the Defra government website in the United Kingdom experienced a similar problem. Opposition-led contributions made a mockery of an effort to solicit public contribution to an environmental contract, resulting in a locked wiki.

 

These ill-fated sites illustrate what few readers of Wikipedia know: While wikis are models of collaboration, collaboration on a wiki is not always pretty. They can be ugly places, full of fights over minutiae and politics, vandalism, repetitive reverts of users' changes, locked pages, self-aggrandizement and spam.

 

Wikipedians themselves struggle with balancing the need to for users to create quality content and the need to filter out poor edits and outright vandalism. Wiki alone is not enough, however. It's the users, often in a closeknit, grassroots-style community, that manage to keep a large wiki like Wikipedia going.

 

Whereas the openness of public wikis can attract vandalism and spam, behind the firewall and in the context of an organization the issues are different. Adoption does not happen overnight and sharing control is not a corporate instinct.

 

"If you let them build it, they will come," says Grahame, who helped found the BBC-owned Wikipedia-esque project h2g2 under the direction of Douglas Adams. The real lesson is in the interaction.

 

"Although it seems that with wikis that people are just editing text, there's something more important going on, which is the editing of structure," Grahame says. "And quite often in the discussion parts, like the talk pages of Wikipedia, that's where you see process evolving. The great thing about wikis is that since they are such blank and restructurable slates, we are able to evolve with them."

The wiki lesson: the power of collaboration

 

While Wikipedia is the best-known wiki, it is incorrect to say that all wikis are encyclopedias. Wikis represent distributed decentralized collaborations, allowing virtually anyone to virtually contribute. The project may be an encyclopedia; niche community center; an office task; a conference; a class; a Second Life -- or even an article, such as this one. Despite the issues that arise -- or because of them -- wikis are remaking the world. But the idea itself is not so novel. Indeed, wisdom older than America's Founding Fathers best describes the power of wiki-facilitated collaboration: e pluribus unum -- out of many, one.

 

Creative Commons License

This work was collaboratively edited by wiki, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

 

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