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Introduction to wikis

15 January, 2016 - 09:44

Wiki applications facilitate collaborative editing supported by revision mechanisms that allow the monitoring of changes. Wiki technology can be used as a community platform but also as a personal authoring environment. Wiki was developed in 1994 by Ward Cunningham. Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word “wiki-wiki” meaning fast. WikiWikiWeb” was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham as an online manual for software programmers to share knowledge (Taylor, 2005). Jimmy Wales built on this idea and created Wikipedia, and now everybody is familiar with Wikipedia, which is itself a Wiki in the form of an online encyclopedia that can be edited by any user. Educators are now experimenting with using Wikis in pedagogically sound ways. Each user has the ability to modify any part of the Wiki space, analogous to a mini-website. Users create new nodes in the hierarchy each time that they want to elaborate, change or add content. Using Wikis can allow for a numerous opportunities for collaboration between students, but students do not have to be in the same physical location to meet with each other. These kinds of programs “allow for cooperation between the instructor and students or among students by using different formats of social interaction” (Godwin-Jones, 2003).

Evaluating the quality of contributions in such collaborative authoring environments is a challenging task (Korfiatis et al., 2006). However, based on the “wisdom of the crowd” principle, one collects and aggregates enough data until there is a consistently reliable answer. Oren et al. (2006) acknowledge that wikis are successful for information collection, but point out that they do not fully satisfy the requirements of PKM. A semantic wiki allows users to make formal descriptions of resources by annotating the pages that represent those resources. Whereas a regular wiki enables users to describe resources in natural language, a semantic wiki allows users to additionally describe resources in formal language. Semantic wikis augment ordinary wikis by using the metadata annotations, and thus may offer better information retrieval and knowledge reuse.

Wikis enable users to collaboratively create and edit web content directly, using a web browser. In other words, a wiki is a collaborative web site whose content can be edited by anyone visiting the site, allowing them to easily create and edit web pages (Chao, 2007). Wikis can serve as a source of information and knowledge, as well as a tool for collaborative authoring. Wikis allow visitors to engage in dialog and share information among participants in group projects, or to engage in learning with each other by using wikis as a collaborative environment in which to construct their knowledge (Boulos et al., 2006). As defined in Leuf and Cunningham (2001), the proper term "Wiki" is used to refer to the essential concept rather than to any particular implementation, the latter being called simply a "wiki". From a technical standpoint, the Wiki concept rests on the World Wide Web, and the underlying HTTP protocol defines how the client-server communications occur. At the functional level, the essence of Wiki can be summarized as follows:

  • a wiki invites any and all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wikisite, using only a simple web browser without any additional add-ons;
  • wiki encourages meaningful topic associations between pages by making the creation of page links almost intuitively easy;
  • rather than serving as a carefully crafted site for casual visitors, a wiki seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing the web site content;
  • semantic wikis extend wikis with formal annotations describing the content and create views;
  • semantic wikis introduce background knowledge;
  • semantic wikis for PKM – formal structure gives automated support and flexibility of wiki gives people freedom.
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