Wiki Manual

What is a Wiki?

Answer: different things to different people. To some it is

• online collaboration software. People from around the globe can edit pages that are instantly updated. Anyone can create, read, and modify resources (webpages) and every other interested party will immediately see the changes.
  • a collective editing of content. Wikipedia is now the canonical example.
  • a Content Management System (CMS) stemming from the previous point

What's the collaboration realm look like just now?

Cluster:Wiki:Why

Why? Motivate me

At it's heart a Wiki is a collaboration tool. The question is when and where to use it? Let's tackle first by giving some use cases:

• (Collaborative) Research
  • Since all changes and every in-between state of pages is stored, it makes simple the three A's of research:
    • Authentication: you can set up wikis so that only certain people can edit content. Thus, to edit content, people will need to authenticate with the wiki software.
    • Authorized: by authenticating, the wiki authorizes them to edit the web resources it contains.
    • Auditing: by editing web resources as an authenticated user, the system now can keep basic statistics, like when a certain piece of information was added or removed, who modified the page, and when. (What do we know and when did we learn it?)

Cluster:Wiki: current Collaboration Scene

Current Topography

• Physically meet
  • Two or more people can have a meeting. Just have everyone who needs to be in on "it" show up at the meeting.
• Letters
  • Allows (roughly) two people to communicate. Just need to pay a lot for stamps, wait a couple of days for the letters to travel.
• Email
  • Akin to letters, but a heck of a lot faster and cheaper. It's also easier to keep multiple people in the loop. (What's the latest thread?)
• Telephone
  • Allows two to communicate over long distances. Teleconference phone calls allow more than two people to communicate. Expensive. People still have to actually (virtually) be at the meeting.
• Wiki
  • Allow anyone in a given group to edit pages on the wiki. When I'm asleep, Alexa in Taiwan can put something up, and then I can read it later. Cheap, instant. "Always up to date." Separates discussion from "solved".
• What's missing?
  • There is at least one item missing from this list. What is it?

I'll motivate wikis in a minute, but first let's see how to do them.