Revisiting Wikis
March 2009 marked the 14th anniversary of the creation of the very first wiki. That was Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb. (Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "fast.") Cunningham described his site as one that focused on "PeopleProjectsAndPatterns in SoftwareDevelopment." His idea of fast, collaborative editing of web pages got immediate interest but not widespread use.
Wikipedia is still the wiki most people are familiar with, but there are probably millions of them now. (I couldn't find an actual count.) Wikipedia began in 2000, but it didn't get much mainstream medi aattention for a few years. The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. Since that software was made freely available, more and more similar-looking wikis began to appear. Wikipedia originally ran on UseModWiki written in Perl, but moved in January 2002 to the PHP wiki engine.
Wikis are often described as “collaborative web sites" and are being used for project management, knowledge sharing and collaborative writing projects (like proposals).
Wikis and blogs began to get a lot of media attention in 2005 and Tim and I were asked to put together a presentation on "Wikis At Work" for an NJIT day-long symposium aimed at the business community.
Our presentation looked at how wikis were being used and how an organization (be it a company or school) might use them.
We were pretty focused on open source wiki software and we had created our own Wiki35 using the Mediawiki software at NJIT.
We also addressed a few commercial products that were available. As with most open source software, eventually someone steps in and adds the IT support for those people who want/need it by offering commercial Wiki products. However, knowing that our audience was primarily made up of small business people, we discussed server installation, support and security considerations for those who do not have an IT department behind them.
Wiki35 is still running. We called it a "metawiki" because it is a wiki about wikis. Though it does not get as many updates these days from Tim or myself, it still gets a good number of visits and the occasional edit from a visitor. In February it had 735,400 hits and in March there were 387,928 hits.
And there are lots of other wikis to use or study. Most wikis allow you to visit the content, but require an account login/password to edit. Here are a few in my bookmarks:
Wikipedia is still the wiki most people are familiar with, but there are probably millions of them now. (I couldn't find an actual count.) Wikipedia began in 2000, but it didn't get much mainstream medi aattention for a few years. The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. Since that software was made freely available, more and more similar-looking wikis began to appear. Wikipedia originally ran on UseModWiki written in Perl, but moved in January 2002 to the PHP wiki engine.
Wikis are often described as “collaborative web sites" and are being used for project management, knowledge sharing and collaborative writing projects (like proposals).
Wikis and blogs began to get a lot of media attention in 2005 and Tim and I were asked to put together a presentation on "Wikis At Work" for an NJIT day-long symposium aimed at the business community.
Our presentation looked at how wikis were being used and how an organization (be it a company or school) might use them.
We were pretty focused on open source wiki software and we had created our own Wiki35 using the Mediawiki software at NJIT.
We also addressed a few commercial products that were available. As with most open source software, eventually someone steps in and adds the IT support for those people who want/need it by offering commercial Wiki products. However, knowing that our audience was primarily made up of small business people, we discussed server installation, support and security considerations for those who do not have an IT department behind them.
Wiki35 is still running. We called it a "metawiki" because it is a wiki about wikis. Though it does not get as many updates these days from Tim or myself, it still gets a good number of visits and the occasional edit from a visitor. In February it had 735,400 hits and in March there were 387,928 hits.
And there are lots of other wikis to use or study. Most wikis allow you to visit the content, but require an account login/password to edit. Here are a few in my bookmarks:
- https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/TLSIG/Home is the Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group (SIG) for the Internet2 community. They also have a wiki for their K20 SIG at https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/k20t/Home
- Wikispaces is a very popular free wiki service with educators. I use it with my students and for my own wikis.
- Here is an update to Bloom's taxonomy to account for the new behaviors
emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy - The New Media Consortium's NMC Campus is a virtual laboratory available to NMC member institutions and their faculty. Located in the virtual world of Second Life, they also have a wiki at http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Many collges have wikis. This is one at Case-Western Reserve University http://wiki.case.edu/Main_Page
- Some authors and publishers, especially of books that involve technology, have created wikis for a book title. A wiki is an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment around the book. An example, is this one based on Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page
- More and more fans and hobbyists who might have once launched a website are now creating wikis that invite collaboration from their community of interest. For example, here's one for fans of the films of Alfred Hitchcock.http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
- Software companies also use wikis to supplu users with product information, updates and to allow users to talk to each other about problems and solutions. As you might guess, that's especially true of open source software. Examples are the wiki for users of the popular Audacity audio recording software that is used by many people to create podcasts. http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page and groups that are quite large (so much so that you might think that they are commercial) like Mozilla (who produce the Firefox browser and other products) use wikis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Main_Page
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