Introduction to the concept wiki

• Usage / Purpose
• Terminology and examples
• Features and functions
• How to get a wiki
  • Wikifarms compared to stand-alone wikis – pros and cons

D2.1 European State of the Art Report

D2.2 User Need Analysis

D2.3 Definition of the Pedagogical Framework

Usage / Purpose

What are wikis used for? Who are using wikis?

by a community of participants as

a central place on the web

for collecting and compiling knowledge together (cooperation and co-writing).

Usage (purpose/goal/results):

• encyclopedias, knowledge banks. building encyclopedic content: purpose heavily inspired from Wikipedia, it is frequently used within companies as well or on local territory wikis. 
  • Wikipedia
  • LyricWiki among other Music wikis on the wikifarm Wikia
  • Kinesiology (sports medicine), Wikispaces (11th & 12th grade Kinesiology (Sports Medicine) students create online fitness training programs and sports injury information for the public)
  • Minecraft Wiki, Mediawiki
  • Who Comments, Semantic Mediawiki on the wikifarm Referata
• documentation, manuals, catalogues, promotional flyers, public documents, reports, books. ¨
  • Wikimedia sister projects, Mediawiki
  • Open Planning Tools, MoinMoin
  • IdeaBlade, XWiki
  • ZetaDoc, DokuWiki
  • Ekopedia, Mediawiki
  • KDE Wiki, Tikiwiki 
• tremendous number of other applications depends a lot on the wiki engine used, 
  • Wikimatrix, DokuWiki, compare different wiki engines
  • Curriki, XWiki, educators share curricula 
  • BestVentes, XWiki, e-commerce
  • QuizMeUp, Drupal wiki
• Website supporting a temporary event, such as a conference: the wiki may host information about the program, about the speakers, content of talk, list of attendees, travel details and much more. Information can be easily and quickly updated by editors in a context of relative urgency. 
  • Wikimania website, Mediawiki 
  • WikiSym website, Wikiengine or wordpress?
  • WikiSym2005, Snipsnap 

Usage (activities):

• collecting, gathering things like historical data, idéas, 
  • Montanta History Wiki, PBworks
• drafting, reviewing, co-writing, compiling
  • WikiSkills project wiki, XWiki
• swift decentralized publishing,
  • StudiWiki, DokuWiki
• knowledge transfer -
  • Diplopedia, Mediawiki, the wiki of the US Diplomatic Department. Internal wiki, screenshot from Wikipedia, "Desk officers rotate out of their positions every two years and often have little lead time to learn the scope of their new job. Diplopedia provides a desk officer manual, advising them on everything from what to make of Department jargon, how to move a paper for decision, or how to navigate a new Ambassador through the complexities of Senate confirmation and assignment to his or her mission."
• managing projects and meetings – (collaborative agenda, protocols)
  • Next agenda, Wikimedia Sverige, Mediawiki
  • Meeting protocols, Wikimedia Sverige, Mediawiki
  • The Mozilla Developer Center, MindTouch Deki
  • Future Melbourne Wiki, TWiki, "Future Melbourne is the community of Melbourne's long-term plan for the future direction of all aspects of city life. Developed by the community, it sets out a vision, goals for the future, key trends and challenges, and outlines strategic growth areas."(C)City of Melbourne

Users/Contributors writing and reading wikis: 

• communities
  • loosely associated participants
  • employees in a company
  • project participants
  • school classes
• (individuals - a personal notebook)

Initiators/Owners: 

• Nonprofit organizations like Wikimedia Foundation (which runs the most notable wiki: Wikipedia)
• Enterprises like Google, IBM ... (usually closed or semi-closed wikis)
• Educational sector, teachers
• Project management group
• Wikifarms – for example Wikia, Wikispaces ..
• (Individuals)

Terminology and examples

"As I was writing the wiki on the wiki, I realized that the wiki was lacking functions." Not very clear, eh?

• Wiki / Wiki site / Projects run on a wiki site - examples
• Wiki / Wiki engine / Wiki software / Wiki platform / Wiki program / Wiki system - examples
• Wiki document / Wiki page / Wiki article - examples

"As I was writing the wiki document Hummingbird on the Wiki site Birdopedia, I realized that the Wiki platform was lacking functions." So, let us try to be specific when we talk to avoid misunderstandings

The first wiki was founded 1995. Since then more than 100 different wiki platforms have been developed. These platforms are used to host many thousands of wiki sites. The most commonly used wiki platform, Mediawiki, is used for more than 4000 wiki sites according to wikiindex.org. These wiki sites consists of some 50 million wiki pages according to wikiindex.org statistics. 

Features and functions

When the first wiki was created 1995 the wiki engine features stood out from traditional systems for documentation and cooperation. Today, however, modern platforms and modern wiki engines share many functions and the difference between wiki engine and traditional systems are diminishing. But even today there are some functions which are common to wiki engines:

• Read and write through web browser, no installation of client program needed.
• Name of page is link to page. Appearance of link shows if page already exists or is wanted.
• Ease of linking between pages promotes context-building and meaningful topic associations. 
• Navigation and search features. Text search, links, back-links, categories ... Hence, several arbitrary ways to reach a wiki page. 
• Built for cooperation and co-writing:
  • Version history – ability to track every revision of a page and return to previous versions. See exactly who has made what change and when that change was made
  • Recent changes  – What is happening on the site? What pages on the wiki site are recently being changed by whom? 
  • Discussion page for every wiki page

Examples of other features that are not common among wiki engines are:

WYSIWYG "What you see is what you get" –  a feature often asked for by non-technical users, fine-grained page permission, page redirection, structured data, footnotes, math formulas ... 

Image with other functions:

How to get a wiki

• Stand alone wiki
• Hosted wiki

Wikifarms compared to stand-alone wikis – pros and cons

Wiki initiators need to decide whether to implement a stand alone wiki or whether to use a wiki farm. Stand-alone wikis need to be implemented, configured, maintained, adapted and backed up by the wiki initiator. Routines for updating software is crucial in order to take part of new functions and correct bugs but more importantly, to avoid security issues. All these technicalities are more demanding than setting up a wiki on a wiki farm where the wiki initiator follows a simplified set-up process proposed by the wiki farm. However, a wiki on a wiki farm is technically limited compared to a stand-alone wiki. A wiki farm owner/administrator strives to streamline the handling of all wikis on the farm and hence wants to avoid too much technical variation between the wikis. Too much technical variation would affect the technical administration. Many wiki farms offer stand-alone solutions for customers/users who want more flexibility and control. However, as these stand-alone wikis need to be individually adapted and handled separately, stand-alone wikis cost more, often much more. Reasons for choosing a wiki farm solution over a stand-alone wiki can be that the wiki initiators and users ...

• are satisfied with a standard solution and do not have any special technical extra requirements
• want a cheap wiki
• want a wiki fast
• lack technical knowledge and resources to implement and maintain a wiki in a professional and secure way
• want to test the wiki software which the farm is offering