ShareThisWhen they hear "wiki," most people think of Wikipedia, that omniscient compendium of knowledge and sometimes misinformation. But Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) is only the best known of a multitude of wikis on all subjects.
A wiki is a Web site that allows anyone to contribute or edit content using wiki software, which is often available for free. The key to a wiki is a community of people who are willing to contribute content, edit content and verify content.
Information within the wiki is tied together by a series of internal links. In Wikipedia, for example, terms within articles are hyperlinked to other articles explaining them.
Because wikis bring together those who contribute content, edit it and improve it, they were an early form of social networking.
Wiki is the Hawaiian word for "fast" and has been backronymed to "what I know is." (A backronym is when an existing word is made into an acronym.)
Although writing an encyclopedia is an excellent use for a wiki, it is by no means the only use.
In the early 2000s, wikis began to be used by groups collaborating on software. Other uses include project communication, corporate intranets and writing documentation for technical users. Some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning.
WikiWikiWeb (c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiWikiWeb), the first wiki, was started by Ward Cunningham and appeared on the Web in 1995. Cunningham came up with the name "wiki" and was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard, a system with virtual "card stacks" with links among the various cards.
To explore the world of wikis, begin by searching Wikipedia for "list of wikis."
There you will find Hudong (hudong.com), a Chinese-language wiki encyclopedia with almost 4 million articles; Citizendium (en.citizendium.org), a wiki encyclopedia in which articles are signed and guided by expert input; and wikiHow (wikihow.com), a huge how-to manual with more than 70,000 articles.
There are encyclopedic wikis of song lyrics (lyrics.wikia.com), food and cooking wikis (foodista.com) and all things Armenian (armeniapedia.org). There are wikis dedicated to travel (wikitravel.org) and mathematics (planetmath.org).
One of the most interesting uses of the wiki format is wikileaks (wikileaks.org), where whistleblowers can anonymously post documents. Wikileaks is currently accepting documents, but is not publishing all of them because it has run out of money.
The site says it will start up full operations when it has received enough through donations to meet its annual operating budget of about $600,000.
Wikileaks has posted documents such as e-mails between climate scientists that caused an upheaval in the global-warming debate; the contents of a Yahoo e-mail account owned by Sarah Palin that was hacked during the 2008 campaign; and 570,000 intercepts of pager messages from the day of the 9/11 attacks, including communications between Pentagon officials and the New York City Police Department.
As you might expect, wikileaks has been sued numerous times and was taken off the Web temporarily as a result of one lawsuit.
While there may not be a wiki covering every topic, there still are a lot of wikis out there, many of them useful and containing high-quality information.
Just remember that anyone can write anything on a wiki, and although many wikis check their content, some do not.
But, after all, if you find something on a wiki you know is wrong, you can always edit it.
(Read TechMan's blog at post-gazette.com/techman. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com.)
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