What is a Wiki?

[ArticleBot]

This is a dedicated thread for discussing the SitePoint article 'What is a Wiki?'

Don't forget Tiki, a great PHP-based wiki solution! (http://tikiwiki.sourceforge.net)

[biggazillakilla]

The only "wiki" site I've participated in is:

http://ww.wikipedia.org/

Any visitor can change any text on that site. And any visitor after that can change your text.

So, in the end, "wiki" seems to be an expression of the belief that people taken together have an enormous body of knowledge (as can be seen in the ubiquitous forums on websites) and that there is more good than bad in the world (trusting anybody to edit the page).

[mmj]

Excellent article. Well researched and well written. I had a basic understanding of the way a wiki worked, but I never did find out who was the first to invent the wiki and where the first wiki is located.

[RubberPaw]

Originally Posted by biggazillakilla

So, in the end, "wiki" seems to be an expression of the belief that people taken together have an enormous body of knowledge (as can be seen in the ubiquitous forums on websites) and that there is more good than bad in the world (trusting anybody to edit the page).

This is only part of the idea of a wiki. The other part of a wiki is the "simplest online database that could possibly work" part of the spectrum. This is the part that I exploit in my personal site.

I find wikis to be great page editing tools, even if I'm the only one editing the page. The wiki allows me to easily edit my content and structure. It keeps track of all the links and connections between content. I can use the wiki to recreate any other type of organizational method, and it'll render a static version of my site to cut down on overhead.

The use of wikis as content management systems has not been nearly explored as much as the wiki-as-community, but this more versatile purpose has much more widespread appeal.

[Percept]

It's unbelievable that I've been surfing the net for 4 years ( let's say 5-15 houres a day ) and never even heard of these Wiki's before.

and the author has never heard about www.tikiwiki.org? Surprising! Since the past year or so, it is the wiki that's been under the most development. It's features exceed far that of twiki. Have a look at it's sourceforget site for further info if wanted.

Don't give Bo so much credit. He only write the book The Wiki Way. Ward Cunningham invented the WikiWikiWeb in 1995 for the Portland Pattern Repository, by himself.

www.wakkawiki.com

There are hundreds of different WikiEngines, but one can get an overview at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines

Some of them however are only CMS, which just borrowed the "Wiki" in their name (like coWiki and Tiki). And others are not very actively developed anymore. The currently most interesting variants are probably:

http://www.oddmuse.org/ (Perl, one of the most advanced forks of the UseMod engine)

http://erfurtwiki.sf.net/ (PHP, very easy to setup and integrate)

http://comawiki.martignier.net/ (PHP, nice fork of WakkaWiki)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JspWiki (Java)

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SnipSnap (Java)

great article, im just curious to know how i can write wiki engine in php for example? i just want to know the concept

THANK YOU for such a great article. I've just been introduced to Wiki (no, I haven't been living under a rock) and I was wondering how to add this feature to my website. Thanks for guiding me in the right direction, my grad partners are going to be thrilled!!!!

[Cruthaitheoir]

For a long time, I have been looking for ANY article about how Wiki-type sites can be monetized, in any way at all, but without luck. Starting to get bizarre. Am I missing something?