A wiki is a website that allows users to collaborate to modify content and structure to maintain a knowledge base. Wikipedia is the largest, most popular and well-known wiki (although it is a collection of wikis) which has been ranked in the top 10 of Alexa’s top sites list since 2007. A wiki is designed to welcome input from anyone no matter if they’re an expert, amateur or just a curious reader to amend articles, this helps provide an environment where anyone can contribute to the larger knowledge base, be it by providing meaningful insights, relevant sources or just rewording sentences to be more beginner-friendly.
Technipages Explains Wiki
Wikis are designed to so that anyone can edit them be they team members editing the company wiki, fans editing a fandom wiki or experts editing an article in their field of expertise on Wikipedia. This openness creates the risk that the system can be abused by vandals or well-meaning but inaccurate editors to add incorrect information, adding junk data, deleting data or even in some cases linking to malware. These issues tend to be caught relatively quickly – depending on the size of the wiki’s community – and are generally easy to undo due to the revision history change log. The design concept of the wiki is to “make it easy to correct mistakes rather than difficult to make them.” Some people believe this makes all content on a site like Wikipedia untrustworthy but in practice, the community is quite strong and most pages are well maintained by people interested in the relevant subject.
Wiki’s do not just have to be general-purpose encyclopedias like Wikipedia, they can be highly focused on one subject like a TV show or movie series, they can be a set of instructions and guides as to business policy and styles, wikis are also used in some software bug trackers as the format and editing tools allow anyone to add useful details to aid in the solving and documentation of issues.
Common Uses of Wiki
- I edited the corporate wiki page on report writing earlier to clarify our style guide.
- All of our product documentation is on the wiki.
- Wikipedia is perhaps the best-known wiki of all time.
Common Misuses of Wiki
- I wiki’d astrophysics last night, it was really interesting.
