What is Wiki?

We all are aware about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. But Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.

Wikipedia itself is a wiki because it is a special type of website designed to make collaboration easy.

Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and cross links between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

courtesy: cerminarafrancesco.blogspot.in

Knowing the purpose of your wiki will help decide the software and hosting options to choose from. Wikis can be personal pages, sprawling communities, or anything in between. You can use a wiki to track your life goals, create a product manual for your business, collaborate with coworkers on a project, create a neighborhood newsletter, create a discussion place for a hobby, and much more.

Wikis work best when they have a broad focus that allows as many knowledgeable writers and editors to contribute as possible. If you are trying to build a popular wiki with lots of community involvement, then the focus should be open-ended enough to allow for lots of expanding.

For example, it would be better to start a wiki about a game company and all their games than just one of their games.

In other words It is a collaborative Web site comprises the perpetual collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Web site using a browser interface, including the work of previous authors. In contrast, a blog, typically authored by an individual, does not allow visitors to change the original posted material, only add comments to the original content.

The term wiki refers to either the Web site or the software used to create the site.

Wiki wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1995.

In next part we will see Types of Wiki, How to build? etc.