What's a Wiki
What is a ‘wiki’?
There are various definitions, but we use ‘wiki’ to mean a website (or a project) that allows anyone to join a collaboration towards a common goal.
As an example, the popular website Wikipedia is a wiki encyclopedia. Thousands of volunteers have contributed to develop the millions of articles that form this encyclopedia. It has become one of top-ten most visited websites in the world.
The wiki approach involves massive online collaboration by people around the world. This is only made possible through the Internet. Wikipedia has shown what collective wisdom of crowds can achieve. Now many people are creating other wonderfully useful wikis.Watch this 4 minute video on YouTube, called Wikis In Plain English.
Wikipedia is great, what other wikis are there?
In addition to encyclopedia, the wiki method is used by many other collaborative websites. Here are some great wikis from our wiki directory.Wiki travel guides are continuously updated by locals and are free for everyone to use. Find a guide to your next travel destination. Or if you know of a new hot spot in your area, add it to one of the wiki guides to your city. Example of travel guides from World66.com: Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Cairo, Florence, Las Vegas, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, San Francisco, Singapore, Venice, Vienna.
Want to find low gasoline prices in your area? You can find real-time gasoline prices reported by drivers at GasBuddy and GasPriceWatch.
An amazing range of how-to guides are freely available. Written by volunteers, reviewed and refined by others. Be a user, reviewer, writer, or all of the above! Examples of how-to guides from wikiHow.com: Make a Frozen Mudslide, Chug a Beer, French Kiss, Get Six Pack Abs, Hack a Coke Machine, Get Rid of Fruit Flies, Remove an Ingrown Hair, Make Jello Shots, and even Flirt.
Is a wiki restricted to text-based collaboration?
While many wikis' collaboration are text-based, the wiki method can involve other media, too.
At the gasoline price tracking website GasBuddy, participants contribute real-time gas prices and gas station locations to a searchable database.
In the full feature film Valkaama about a German writer's adventure in Sweden, participants are asked to collaborate on post production, such as editing alternative cuts, composing the music score, mixing in sound effects, creating the 5.1 channel surround mix, creating opening and closing credits, and dubbing the whole movie into different languages.
What’s the difference between open source and wiki?
Open source usually refers to a method of software development where volunteer programmers openly collaborate to develop software. Firefox, for example, is an open source web browser developed by volunteered programmers. In this sense, open source is wiki software, that is, software developed using the wiki way.What kind of projects is a wiki good at?
The book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (essential reading for wiki enthusiasts) lists three conditions.1. The object of production is information or culture, which keeps the cost of participation low from contributors.
2. Tasks can be chunked out into bite-sized pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independently of other producers (i.e. entries in an encyclopedia or components of a software program). This makes their overall investment of time and energy minimal in relation to the benefits they receive in return.
3. The costs of integrating those pieces into a finished end product, including leadership and quality-control mechanisms, must be low.
It further says ...
Even when these conditions are present, peer production still faces obstacles. Communities need systems of peer review and leaders who can help guide and manage interactions and help integrate the disparate contributions from users. They also need to design rules for cooperation, cope with free riders, and figure out ways of motivating and coordinating collective action over long periods of time.
Intrigued? Want to talk wiki with other enthusiasts? Visit our forum.
What does this website do?
Wiki1001 is a directory of wikis around the world. Wiki enthusiasts can discover wikis of their interests while wiki organizers can promote their wikis.
See About Us for more details.