Wiki - what is it?

A wiki is a web based group collaboration system.

• Extremely low barrier to participation
• Anyone with a web browser and internet access can participate
• Optional and very simple text based document markup tools
• Automatic Hyperlink creation
• Self-organizing links between pages
• Open editing — anyone can edit anything
• Page editing history automatically maintained

Ward Cunningham, describes his design goal when creating the first wiki:

   "The simplest online database that could possibly work."

More here: What is a Wiki

Wiki History

Wiki was invented by Ward Cunningham
in 1995. This original wiki is still online has grown to over 25,000 pages.

More here: Wiki History

What can I do with a Wiki?

Wikis are in use by companies like:

• British Telecom
• Disney
• Motorola
• many other small to large organizations

For things like:

• FAQ and knowledge base
• To design and document software projects
• To track issues, bugs, and features
• Document management
• Group collaboration
• Software archive
• Internal company intranet (phone directory, job listings, etc.)

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia open-content encyclopedia is the largest known wiki.
It has over 600,000 articles in 83 languages contributed by site visitors and growing fast.
There are over 80 million words in the English Wikipedia compared to 55 million words in
the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The content quality varies, but much is of surprisingly high quality.

• Visit Wikipedia

Wiki Resources

Software to implement a wiki is freely available in almost any language you can name.
Most wiki software is open source.
One directory of wiki software lists 118 publicly available wiki packages in implemented in
languages ranging from AWK to Visual Basic.

• Wiki Engines Directory

There are also Wiki hosting services, both free and pay:

• Wiki Farm Directory

The major wiki software:

• MediaWiki - Used for Wikipedia (PHP/Mysql)
• Twiki - Very feature rich (Perl/RCS)
• MoinMoin - Multi-platform (Python)
• PHPwiki - (PHP/Mysql)
• Tiki - wiki+forums+polls+blogs+kitchen sink (PHP/Mysql)

Security Issues

The first question that comes to mind when someone first hears about a wiki with its
free-for-all/open content editing and creation --

Why doesn't chaos reign?

Wikipedia.com has over 15,000 contributors that made over 800,000 changes last month
(April 2004). Yet in general, Wikipedia is well organized and has lots of high quality content.
Why doesn't it end up as the internet equivalent of a graffiti covered public wall?

Most People

Most people are polite and willing to work cooperatively.

Community

There is community pressure to maintain the integrity of content.

Ease of monitoring

Most wiki's make it easy to monitor changes

• Users can subscribe to be notified via email when selected pages change.
• System reports show all recently changed pages

Ease of recovery

Almost all wikis have an easy way to revert a page to is previous content.
If a page is vandalized, it is very easy to roll back to a previous good version.

User control

Many wikis can block updates from selected users. This feature is seldom needed.

WWW.VOIP-INFO.ORG

I started the voip-info.org wiki in September 2003 as a place to share the results of my
research on VOIP. Soon after that Olle E. Johansson saw one of my posts on the
Asterisk Mailing list and began posting large quantities of Asterisk Information.

Usage grew rapidly, currently the wiki has over 2000 registered contributors,
contains over 1000 pages and has several thousand visitors a day.

Come join us!

• www.voip-info.org

May 16, 2004
James H Thompson
jht@commpartners.us