[MLB-WIRELESS] OT: Press - What a wiki thing to do

[Tyson Clugg]

What a wiki thing to do 
By Jenny Sinclair 
July 22 2003 


Experienced software developers may have known about "wikis" for yonks - the site wiki.org says they have existed since 1995 - but they appear never to have been mentioned in the mainstream press, in Australia, at least. 

A wiki is a website that can be edited over a web interface. Sounds like just another weblog? Not really. Wikis are typically open to all comers interested in the topic at hand, making them excellent resource-building tools. Also, their pages form more of a semi-permanent network of organised information than the ephemeral time-based entries of blogs.

For example, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) is an online encyclopedia. Each page has an "edit" button that lets any web user change the text on the page, or create new pages. It wouldn't require any coding skills for a malicious user to ruin years of work - except that wikis also store past versions, so the keepers of Wikipedia can quickly erase any damage. Users' IP addresses are also logged.

Tyson Clugg, a wiki enthusiast and president of the Melbourne Wireless Group, says his group uses its wiki to write technical documents because it allows several people to work on the same document without having to know who has the "live copy". 

Working with a wiki promotes a collaborative approach, with differences being thrashed out on chat connections or face to face, rather than by constant rounds of changes to the text, he says. "In practice, it takes a little bit of a different approach in how you write the document." 



Clugg says the "soft security" approach of keeping backups, combined with the fact that a vandal would have to go laboriously through a wiki page by page to change it, has kept hacking of wikis to a minimum.

It's a serendipitous combination of open-source software with open-source content.

Clugg says he loves wikis, partly for the way their stripped-down interfaces and the limits on what can be done on a page keep the focus on content: "It makes things doable but not too fancy." 

Other wikis function as community resources and bulletin boards. 

Ward Cunningham, of the site c2.com, based in Portland, Oregon, invented not only the wiki, but the name wiki-wiki, as slang for "quick web", based on the Hawaiian word for quick.

Wikis can be kept private simply by adding a user login requirement. Some use "camel case", in which running together capitalised words like this - "NewPage" - will create a new page on which information can be entered. More advanced features track your progress through a wiki and can tell you what's been changed lately.

Most wiki information sites include a "sandbox" where new users can play with the code as much as they like; one busy sandbox is at c2.com/cgi/wiki. And like blogging, there are "wiki farms" where non-commercial users can build wikis for free - seedwiki.com is just one.


This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/21/1058639712033.html 
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