From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the type of website.
For the article about Wikipedia, see .
For other uses, see .
"WikiNode" redirects here. For the WikiNode of Wikipedia, see .
Interview with Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki
A wiki ( ) is a
which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in
with others. In a typical wiki, text is written using a simplified
(known as "wiki markup") or a . While a wiki is a type of , it differs from a
or most other such systems in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader, and wikis have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users.
The encyclopedia project
is the most popular wiki on the public web in terms of page views, but there are many sites running many different kinds of . Wikis can serve many different purposes both public and private, including , ,
and . Some permit control over different functions (levels of access). For example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules may also be imposed to organize content.
, the developer of the first wiki software, , originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". "Wiki" (pronounced ) is a
word meaning "quick".
, inventor of the wiki
Ward Cunningham and co-author , in their book , described the essence of the Wiki concept as follows:
A wiki invites all users to edit any
or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a
Web browser without any extra .
Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.
A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser. A single page in a wiki website is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by , is "the wiki". A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.
A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Many wikis are open to alteration by the general public without requiring registration of
accounts. Many edits can be made in
and appear almost instantly online. This can facilitate abuse of the system. Private wiki servers require
to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them.
, Cito Maramba and
write that the open wikis produce a process of . "'Unfit' sentences and sections are ruthlessly culled, edited and replaced if they are not considered 'fit', which hopefully results in the evolution of a higher quality and more relevant page. Whilst such openness may invite 'vandalism' and the posting of untrue information, this same openness also makes it possible to rapidly correct or restore a 'quality' wiki page."
Some wikis have an "edit" button or link directly on the page being viewed, if the user has permission to edit the page. If the user does not have the ability to edit the page (due to protection) the page may have a button that says "view source". This leads to an editing page which allows participants to structure and format wiki pages with a simplified markup language, sometimes known as
(for example, starting a line of text with an
often sets up a ). The style and syntax of wikitexts can vary greatly among wiki implementations,[] some of which also allow
tags. Wikis favour plain-text editing, with fewer and simpler conventions than HTML, for indicating style and structure. Although limiting access to HTML and
(CSS) of wikis limits user ability to alter the structure and formatting of wiki content, there are some benefits. Limited access to CSS promotes consistency in the look and feel, and having
disabled prevents a user from implementing code that may limit other users' access. The "view source" link links to a page where the user can view the markup of the page.
Equivalent HTML
Rendered output
"Take some more [[tea]]," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had '''nothing''' yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take ''less''?" said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take ''more'' than nothing."
&p&"Take some more &a href="/wiki/Tea" title="Tea"&tea&/a&," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.&/p&
&p&"I've had &b&nothing&/b& yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."&/p&
&p&"You mean you can't take &i&less&/i&?" said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take &i&more&/i& than nothing."&/p&
"Take some more ," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take less?" said the Hatter. "It's very easy to take more than nothing."
Wikis can make
editing available to users, usually by means of
control that translates graphically entered formatting instructions into the corresponding
or wikitext. In those implementations, the markup of a newly edited, marked-up version of the page is generated and submitted to the server , shielding the user from this technical detail. However, WYSIWYG controls do not always provide all of the features available in wikitext, and some users prefer not to use a WYSIWYG editor. Hence, many of these sites offer some means to edit the wikitext directly. An example of this is the
on Wikipedia.
Some wikis keep a record of change often, every version of the page is stored. This means that authors can revert to an older version of the page, should it be necessary because a mistake has been made or the page has been vandalized. Many implementations, like , allow users to supply an edit summary w this is a short piece of text summarising the changes. It is not inserted into the article, but is stored along with that revision of the page, allowing users to explain what h this is similar to a log message when making changes to a
Within the text of most pages there are usually a large number of
links to other pages. This form of non-linear navigation is more "native" to wiki than structured/formalized navigation schemes. That said, users can also create any number of index or table-of-contents pages, with hierarchical categorization or whatever form of organization they like. These may be challenging to maintain by hand, as multiple authors create and delete pages in an ad hoc manner. Wikis can provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages.
Some wikis have a backlink feature, which displays all pages that link to a given page. It is typical in a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the wiki.
Links are created using a specific syntax, the so-called "link pattern" (also see ). Originally, most wikis[] used
to name pages and create links. These are produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word "CamelCase" is itself an example). While CamelCase makes linking very easy, it also leads to links which are written in a form that deviates from the standard spelling. To link to a page with a single-word title, one must abnormally capitalize one of the letters in the word (e.g. "WiKi" instead of "Wiki"). CamelCase-based wikis are instantly recognizable because they have many links with names such as "TableOfContents" and "BeginnerQuestions." It is possible for a wiki to render the visible anchor of such links "pretty" by reinserting spaces, and possibly also reverting to lower case. However, this reprocessing of the link to improve the readability of the anchor is limited by the loss of capitalization information caused by CamelCase reversal. For example, "RichardWagner" should be rendered as "Richard Wagner", whereas "PopularMusic" should be rendered as "popular music". There is no easy way to determine which
should remain capitalized. As a result, many wikis now have "free linking" using brackets, and some disable CamelCase by default.
Most wikis offer at least a title , and sometimes a . The scalability of the search depends on whether the wiki engine uses a database. Some wikis, such as , use . MediaWiki's first versions used flat files, but it was rewritten by
in the early 2000s to be a database application. Indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. Alternatively, external
can sometimes be used on wikis with limited searching functions in order to obtain more precise results.
Main article:
was the first wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, and installed it on the
on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a
counter employee telling him to take the "" bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."
Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's , which he had used before but which was single-user. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual "card stacks" supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed
ideas by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text." Cunningham says his goals were to link together the experiences of multiple people to create a new literature to document programming , and to harness people's natural desire to talk and tell stories with a technology that would feel comfortable to those not used to "authoring".
became the most famous wiki site, entering the top ten most popular websites in 2007. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Some
as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance . There may be greater use of wikis behind
than on the public Internet. On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online .
is a type of
that runs a wiki system, allowing web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. It may be implemented as a series of scripts behind an existing , or as a standalone
that runs on one or more web servers. The content is stored in a , and changes to the content are stored in a . A commonly implemented software package is , which runs . See the
for further information. Alternatively,
run as a standalone application on a single computer.
is an example. Or even single local HTML file with JavaScript inside – like .
Wikis can also be created on a "", where the server side software is implemented by the wiki farm owner. , , , and
are popular examples of such services. Some wiki farms can also make private, password-protected wikis. Note that free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page. For more information, see .
"Recent changes" redirects here. For the Wikipedia help page, see .
History comparison reports highlight the changes between two revisions of a page.
Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is the "Recent Changes" page—a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame. Some wikis can filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts ("").
From the change log, other functions are accessible in most wikis: the
shows previous page versions and the
feature highlights the changes between two revisions. Using the revision history, an editor can view and restore a previous version of the article. The diff feature can be used to decide whether or not this is necessary. A regular wiki user can view the diff of an edit listed on the "Recent Changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, consult the history, restoring this process is more or less streamlined, depending on the wiki software used.
In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "recent changes" page, some wiki engines provide additional content control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly. A watchlist is a common implementation of this.
Some wikis also implement "patrolled revisions", in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark some edits as not vandalism. A "flagged revisions" system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed.
Critics of publicly editable wiki systems argue that these systems could be easily tampered with, while proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content and correct it. , a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows:
Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a Web site that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well.
High editorial standards in medicine have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis. Some wikis allow one to link to specific versions of articles, which has been useful to the scientific community, in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles, improve them and provide links to the trusted version of that article.
Noveck points out that "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation." On controversial topics that have been subject to disruptive editing, a wiki may restrict editing to registered users.
The open philosophy of wiki – allowing anyone to edit content, does not ensure that every editor's intentions are well-mannered. For example,
(changing wiki content to something offensive, adding nonsense or deliberately adding incorrect information) can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites, such as those run by the ,
can go unnoticed for some period of time. Wikis, because of their open access nature, are susceptible to intentional disruption, known as "". Wikis tend to take a [] approach to the problem of vandalism, making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage. Larger wikis often employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism and JavaScript enhancements that show characters that have been added in each edit. In this way vandalism can be limited to just "minor vandalism" or "sneaky vandalism", where the characters added/eliminated are so few that bots do not identify them and users do not pay much attention to them.[] An example of a bot which is used on Wikipedia to revert vandalism is ClueBot NG. ClueBot NG has the ability to revert edits, often "within minutes, if not seconds". The bot uses machine learning in lieu of heuristics.
The amount of vandalism a wiki receives depends on how open the wiki is. For instance, some wikis allow unregistered users, identified by their , to edit content, whilst others limit this function to just registered users. Most wikis allow anonymous editing without an account, but give registered users addition on most wikis, becoming a registered user is a short and simple process. Some wikis require an additional waiting period before gaining access to certain tools. For example, on the , registered users can rename pages only if their account is at least four days old and has made at least ten edits. Other wikis such as the
use an editing requirement instead of a time requirement, granting extra tools after the user has made a certain number of edits to prove their trustworthiness and usefulness as an editor.
is common (though policed and usually reverted) because it is extremely open, allowing anyone with a computer and Internet access to edit it, although this makes it grow rapidly. In contrast,
requires an editor's real name and short autobiography, affecting the growth of the wiki but sometimes helping stop vandalism.
Edit wars can also occur as users repetitively revert a page to the version they favor. Some wiki software allows an administrator to stop such edit wars by locking a page from further editing until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate.
Some wikis are in a better position than others to control behavior due to governance structures existing outside the wiki. For instance, a college teacher can create incentives for students to behave themselves on a class wiki they administer by limiting editing to logged-in users and pointing out that all contributions can be traced back to the contributors. Bad behavior can then be dealt with in accordance with university policies.
can also be problem, as users can add links to sites hosting malicious code. For example, a German Wikipedia article about the
was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website. Users of vulnerable Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link would be infected. A countermeasure is the use of software that prevents users from saving an edit that contains a link to a site listed on a
of malware sites.
It has been suggested that
into this section. () Proposed since May 2014.
The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the
and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.[] Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, ,
and , a Swedish-language knowledge base. Medical and health-related wiki examples include , an online collaborative medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts.
are private, particularly within . They are often used as
for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to help produce software documentation. A study of corporate wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work. In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.[] Wikis can be used for .[]
Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on , , departmental documentation, and committee work. In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend amongst industries toward collaboration was placing a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.
Wikis have found some use within the legal profession, and within government. Examples include the 's , designed to share and collect , dKospedia, which was used by the
to assist with review of documents pertaining to internm and the wiki of the , used to post court rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The
operates , a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding
relevant to examination of pending patent applications. , New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park.
founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called Wex, whose growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit.
WikiNodes are pages on wikis that describe related wikis. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor wiki is simply a wiki that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate wiki is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.
One way of finding a wiki on a specific subject is to follow the wiki-node netwo another is to take a Wiki "bus tour", for example: .
The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are reader, author, wiki administrator and system administrator. The system administrator is responsible for installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. The wiki administrator maintains wiki content and is provided additional functions pertaining to pages (e.g. page protection and deletion), and can adjust users' access rights by, for instance, blocking them from editing.
A study of several hundred wikis showed that a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is lik that access controls restricting editing to registered users te that a lack of such access controls tends to fuel n and that higher administration ratios (i.e. admins/user) have no significant effect on content or population growth.
Conferences and meetings about wikis in general include:
The International Symposium on Wikis (), a
dedicated to wiki research and practice in general.
on wiki-related topics
Conferences on specific wiki sites and applications include:
Atlassian Summit, an annual conference for users of
software, including
RegioWikiCamp, a semi-annual unconference on "regiowikis", or wikis on cities and other geographic areas.
SMWCon, a bi-annual conference for users and developers of .
TikiFest, a frequently held meeting for users and developers of .
, an annual conference dedicated to the research and practice of
projects like Wikipedia.
Wikis typically have a set of rules governing user behavior. Wikipedia, for instance, has a labyrinthine set of policies and guidelines summed up in its five pillars: Wikipedi Wikipedia has a n Wikip Wikipedians should interact in a respect and Wikipedia does not have firm rules. Many wikis have adopted a set of commandments. For instance,
commands, among other things, that its editors use "" rather than "" when referring to years prior to A.D.1 and refrain from "unproductive activity." One teacher instituted a commandment for a class wiki, "."
Joint authorship of articles, in which different users participate in correcting, editing, and compiling the finished product, can also cause editors to become
of the copyright, making it impossible to republish without the permission of all co-owners, some of whose identities may be unknown due to pseudonymous or anonymous editing. However, where persons contribute to a collective work such as an encyclopedia, there is no joint ownership if the contributions are separate and distinguishable. Despite most wikis' tracking of individual contributions, the action of contributing to a wiki page is still arguably one of jointly correcting, editing, or compiling which would give rise to joint ownership.
Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an
license. Version 2 of the
includes a specific provision
licenses are also popular. When no license is specified, an implied license to read and add content to a wiki may be deemed to exist on the grounds of business necessity and the inherent nature of a wiki, although the legal basis for such an implied license may not exist in all circumstances.[]
Wikis and their users can be held liable for certain activities that occur on the wiki. If a wiki owner displays indifference and forgoes controls (such as banning copyright infringers) that he could have exercised to stop copyright infringement, he may be deemed to have authorized infringement, especially if the wiki is primarily used to infringe copyrights or obtains direct financial benefit, such as advertising revenue, from infringing activities. In the United States, wikis may benefit from , which protects sites that engage in "" policing of harmful material, with no requirement on the quality or quantity of such self-policing. However, it has also been argued that a wiki's enforcement of certain rules, such as anti-bias, verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no-original-research policies, could pose legal risks. When
occurs on a wiki, theoretically all users of the wiki can be held liable, because any of them had the ability to remove or amend the defamatory material from the "publication." It remains to be seen whether wikis will be regarded as more akin to an , which is generally not held liable due to its lack of control over publications' contents, than a publisher.
It has been recommended that trademark owners monitor what information is presented about their trademarks on wikis, since courts may use such content as evidence pertaining to public perceptions. Joshua Jarvis notes, "Once misinformation is identified, the trade mark owner can simply edit the entry."
The realization of the Hawaiian /w/
varies between [w] and [v], and the realization of the /k/ phoneme varies between [k] and [t], among other realizations. Thus, the pronunciation of the Hawaiian word wiki varies between ['wiki], ['witi], ['viki], and ['viti]. See
for more details.
(London: ) 1, 2007
Mitchell, Scott (July 2008), , MSDN Magazine
(June 27, 2002), , WikiWikiWeb
[Retrieved September 19, 2008].
Hasan, Heather (2012), Wikipedia, 3.5 million articles and counting, p. 11,  
Andrews, Lorrin (1865), , Henry M. Whitney, p. 514
. See Ward Cunningham's site
Black, P Delaney, H Fitzgerald, Brian (2007),
14, eLaw J.
Boulos, M.N.K.; Maramba, I.; Wheeler, S. (2006), , BMC medical education (BMC Medical Education) 6: 41, :,  ,  
Naomi, A Raitman, R Zhou, Wanlei (2004), Teaching and learning online with wikis, Beyond the comfort zone, :
, p. 10
Cunningham, Ward (November 1, 2003), , WikiWikiWeb
Cunningham, Ward (February 25, 2008), , WikiWikiWeb
Cunningham, Ward (July 26, 2007), , WikiWikiWeb
Diamond, Graeme (March 1, 2007), ,
, p. 20
, p. 54
, p. 178
, p. 109
Goldman, Eric, Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences 8, Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law
Barsky, E Giustini, Dean (December 2007), , Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 28 (4): 147–150.  
Yager, Kevin (March 16, 2006), , Nature 440 (7082): 278, :, :(subscription required)
Noveck, Beth Simone (March 2007), , Journal of Legal Education 57 (1)(subscription required)
, , September 20, 2006
(in French). M3m.homelinux.org.
Hicks, Jesse (February 18, 2014). . The Verge. The Verge.
, p. 108
, S23Wiki, April 3, 2008
Müller, C.; Birn, L. (September 6–8, 2006), , Proceedings of I-KNOW '06
Majchrzak, A.; Wagner, C.; Yates, D. (2006), , Corporate wiki users: results of a survey, Symposium on Wikis, p. 99, :,  
Conlin, Michelle (November 28, 2005), , Bloomberg BusinessWeek
[Retrieved 8 May 2012].
Wanderley, M.M.; Birnbaum, D.; Malloch, J. (2006), , IRCAM – Centre Pompidou, p. 180,  
Lombardo, Nancy T. (June 2008),
27 (2), Medical Reference Services Quarterly, pp. 129–145
web.archive.org
Cubric, Marija (2007), , University of Hertfordshire
Roth, C.; Taraborelli, D.; Gilbert, N. (2008), , The Centre for Research in Social Simulation, p. 3, "Figure 4 shows that having a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth."
Roth, C.; Taraborelli, D.; Gilbert, N. (2008), , The Centre for Research in Social Simulation
[Retrieved June 20, 2011].
Wiki.regiowiki.eu. ; June 10, 2011 [Retrieved June 20, 2011].
Semantic-mediawiki.org.
[Retrieved June 20, 2011].
[Retrieved June 20, 2011].
; May 15, 2010 [Retrieved July 24, 2010].
Redwood Music Ltd v. B Feldman & Co Ltd (RPC 385), 1979
Walsh, Kathleen M.; Oh, Sarah (February 23, 2010),
Myers, Ken S. (2008), , Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society) 20: 163
Jarvis, Joshua (May 2008), , Managing Intellectual Property (179): 101–103
Ebersbach, Anja (2008), Wiki: Web Collaboration, ,  
Leuf, Bo; Cunningham, Ward (April 13, 2001), The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, ,  
Mader, Stewart (December 10, 2007), Wikipatterns, ,  
Tapscott, Don (April 17, 2008), Wikinomics: How
Changes Everything, Portfolio Hardcover,  
This audio file was created from a revision of the "Wiki" article dated , and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ()
Find more about
at Wikipedia's
from Wiktionary
from Commons
from Wikiversity
on Wikidata
from MediaWiki
, a directory of wikis
, an interview with
by Bill Verners
, a website for comparing wiki software and hosts
, a wiki about publications about wikis
, a volunteer group to preserve wikis
Murphy, Paula (April 2006). . .
- Woas (my wiki-on-a-stick fork)
: Hidden categories:}