What’s a wiki and why would I want one?

Once you’ve been reading blogs for a while, you’ll come across the term ‘wiki’. What is a wiki? Where can you get one? And why would you want one? For the answers to these and other questions beginning with ‘W’, read on…

A wiki is simply a website that can be quickly and easily edited by its readers - anyone can add new pages or change ones that already exist, and you don’t need to know any HTML code to do so. At the bottom of every page, there’s a ‘Edit this page’ link, and clicking on this takes you into a simple form where you can add, change or delete the page’s text.

So what’s the big deal? Simply that anyone can do it - anyone who’s got enough knowledge to use a keyboard, mouse and browser has the skills to create and change web pages. There’s no HTML or XML or CSS or any other TLAs - just a simple form and plain text.

But why would anyone want to add or edit pages? To answer that one, consider a hypothetical situation for a moment. Imagine a helpdesk - and it doesn’t have to be IT-related - that deals with queries from customers. To answer those queries, the staff need to know about the products that they’re dealing with. Because it’s unlikely that no-one will know everything about the products, the chances are that there will be some kind of product documentation available for the staff to refer to - or documents about processes and procedures and so on. Someone somewhere will have the job of producing it and keeping it up to date. If the environment is relatively up-to-date, the documents may even be online, perhaps on an intranet.

So far, so good. If the documentation is good, it’ll make everyone’s lives much easier. But the chances are that it’ll be incomplete, or things will have changed, or people will have worked out better ways to do things - which means that staff will end up making notes of their own. Perhaps they’ll scribble notes in the margins of their printed copies, or have their own files in which they keep the notes that they’ve made. Either way, the information will be spread out around the helpdesk - people on either side of the room may not have the same information to work with, and so they could end up giving customers completely different advice about exactly the same situation.

Now imagine a situation where the documentation can be kept up-to-date - online - by anyone. If someone on the frontline helpdesk realises there’s a better way of doing things, they can add a note to the online version of the procedure simply by clicking the ‘edit page’ link and entering their text. The knowledge isn’t hidden away in their notes; nor is there a delay while the update works its way through the internal update bureaucracy.

A great example of the power of a wiki is the Wikipedia. As the name suggests, it’s an encyclopedia powered by a wiki, and is the fruit of a massive collaborative effort by people all over the world, pooling their knowledge. If you find a topic that doesn’t have an entry, simply create one. If you find an entry which is missing some vital information, just add it. If you find an entry which is incorrect, update it.

One of the most common questions asked about wikis is “what’s to stop someone posting rubbish or vandalising existing entries?” Well, the answer in most situations is “nothing - but it tends not doesn’t happen.” Suprising as it may seem, even public wikis like the Wikipedia have very little problems with malicious postings or casual vandalism. Noone’s really sure exactly why, but this seldom seems to be a problem. And in any case, most wiki software have ‘rollback’ functions that an administrator can use to reset an entry back to its original form.

So how do you work with a wiki?

Simply click the ‘Edit this page’ link, and type away as if you were in a word processor or a text editor. Once you’ve finished, click the ‘Submit’ link, and your page will be transformed into a web page and displayed as if you had created it the hard way.

The real magic of wikis becomes apparent when you need to create a new page. The editing page of a wiki will recognise WikiWords - that’s two or more words with initial capital letters run together LikeThis - as links. If there’s a page with ThisName already in existence, the wiki software will create a link to it. If not, you’ll see the WikiWord displayed with a question mark after it - LikeThis? Clicking on the question mark will take you into the editing form for the LikeThis page, where you can edit the text in exactly the same way as you would an existing page.

So the advantage of all this is that anyone can create or edit web pages that can then be read in a web browser without needing to know anything about HTML or web development, or needing web editing software such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. There’s no need for the bottleneck of a webmaster or a designer - if there’s something you need to add to a page, just do it there and then - it’s as quick and as simple as writing an email.

Wikis are also extremely quick and easy to set up - the software is very simple, so there’s no need for powerful hardware or software, and there are versions of wikis for every web server platform around, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using Windows or Unix or Linux or Mac. If you’ve already got an intranet or a webserver, it’ll be able to run a wiki. And most of the software is open-source, which means that it’s effectively free - no software costs or user licensing fees.

So who uses wikis?

The largest and most widely-known wiki is Wikipedia, but you’ll often find them in environments where it’s important that information is kept up to date, such as helpdesks. Many organisations use them to provide product information on an intranet, because it’s so quick and easy to keep them up-to-date. And situations where several people need to collaborate to create content lend themselves to wikis - there’s even an open-source novel, where the author has encouraged people to change the text of the book so that he can select the best bits of the collaborative effort.

More information

For more information about wikis, the place to start is the WikiWikiWeb, which contains everything you could possibly want to know about wikis, how they work, their history and the various different versions and types. And if you want to experience how a wiki works, the WikiWikiWeb has the ’sandbox’, which is an area of the site that you can play around with to your heart’s content.

And finally - what does wiki mean?

It’s actually Hawaiian for quick!

Filed under Blogs, Technical stuff |