In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend among industries toward collaboration placed a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom. In addition to using the approach of soft security for protecting themselves, larger wikis may employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism. “Edit war” redirects here; not to be confused with Edit conflict.
Modified version of the logo of English Wikipedia celebrating its 25th anniversary Many other Wikipedias are available; some of the largest are listed below. It has a history of consumption by the Māori, with the larva being consumed either raw or traditionally cooked in a hāngī.
The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page content, while others use a relational database, as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching. HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of Vannevar Bush, the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to “comment on and change one another’s text”.
Example of syntax
Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Cunningham’s system was inspired by his having used Apple’s hypertext software HyperCard, which allowed users to create interlinked “stacks” of virtual cards. It is typically possible for users of a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite the creation of those pages. Some wiki implementations attempt to improve the display of camel case page titles and links by reinserting spaces and possibly also reverting to lower case, but this simplistic method is not able to correctly present titles of mixed capitalization. While this system made it easy to link to pages, it had the downside of requiring pages to be named in a form deviating from standard spelling, and titles of a single word required abnormally capitalizing one of the letters (e.g. “WiKi” instead of “Wiki”).
- Most wikis offer a recent changes page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.
- 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.
- It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias.
- On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online Oxford English Dictionary.
- Critics of publicly editable wikis argue that they could be easily tampered with by malicious individuals, or even by well-meaning but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content.
- Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of pages to maintain quality.
Some wiki engines offer a blacklist feature which prevents users from adding hyperlinks to specific sites that have been placed on the list by the wiki’s administrators. Wiki implementations retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert peer reviewers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they have analyzed. For example, in 2006 a German Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website, and users of vulnerable Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link had their systems infected with the worm. Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of pages to maintain quality. Wiki administrators maintain content and, through having elevated privileges, are granted additional functions (including, for example, preventing edits to pages, deleting pages, changing users’ access rights, or blocking them from editing). In this concept of wiki federation, in which the same content can be hosted and edited in more than one location in a manner similar to distributed version control, the idea of a single discrete “wiki” no longer made sense.
Wikipedia’s sister projects
As most wikis allow the creation of hyperlinks to other sites and services, the addition of malicious hyperlinks, such as sites infected with malware, can also be a problem. Some wikis may be subject to external structures of governance which address the behavior of persons with access to the system, for example in academic contexts. Some wiki software allows administrators to prevent pages from being editable until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate. Trolling and cybervandalism on wikis, where content is changed to something deliberately incorrect or a hoax, offensive material or nonsense is added, or content is maliciously removed, can be a major problem. High editorial standards in medicine and health sciences articles, in which users typically use peer-reviewed journals or university textbooks as sources, have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis. Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified by a wiki’s community of users.
Some companies use wikis as their collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Such links are usually differentiated visually in some fashion, such as being colored red royaldogs casino instead of the default blue, which was the case in the original WikiWikiWeb, or by appearing as a question mark next to the linked words. This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.
External links
For the version of Wikipedia written in Basic English, see Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedi be a free-content online encyclopedia wey community of volunteers, dem know as Wikipedians dey wrep den dey maintain am, thru open collaboration den de wiki software MediaWiki. 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. Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an open content license.
The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. These ideas include “featured articles”, the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short “stub” articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations. Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. The English Wikipedia currently has 54,334,804 registered accounts of which 811 are administrators. English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base.
History
- For the version of Wikipedia written in Basic English, see Simple English Wikipedia.
- Some wikis operate a structure of neighbors and delegates, where a neighbor wiki is one which discusses similar content or is otherwise of interest, and a delegate wiki is one which has agreed to have certain content delegated to it.
- Wikis may allow any person on the web to edit their content without having to register an account on the site first (anonymous editing), or require registration as a condition of participation.
- While this system made it easy to link to pages, it had the downside of requiring pages to be named in a form deviating from standard spelling, and titles of a single word required abnormally capitalizing one of the letters (e.g. “WiKi” instead of “Wiki”).
- Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an open content license.
- While wiki engines have traditionally offered source editing to users, as early as 2013, some implementations have added a rich text editing mode.
- English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias.
In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example Kingdom of France. To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained free links (called wikilinks), wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. For example, “Kingdom of France” as a page title would be written as “KingdomOfFrance”, and displayed as “Kingdom Of France”. Beginning with WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used camel case to name pages, which is when words in a phrase are capitalized and the spaces between them removed. The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations.
The version history feature allows harmful changes to be reverted quickly and easily. Most wikis offer a recent changes page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame. Some hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis requiring authentication to access. The software which powers a wiki may be implemented as a series of scripts which operate an existing web server, a standalone application server that runs on one or more web servers, or in the case of personal wikis, run as a standalone application on a single computer.