WikiWikiWeb

From Collaboratory

Wikis are web sites that anyone can edit. They are especially good for community knowledge capture.

Wikis have two distinguishing feature:

Anyone can edit a page, usually using either a simplified text markup language or a WYSIWYG editor.
You can Link As You Think. To link to another page on the Wiki (whether or not it exists), you just refer to it by its page name.

For more information on Wikis, see the original Wiki:WikiWikiWeb and read Wikipedia:Wiki.

We use Wikis extensively here. We started with PurpleWiki and are in the process of moving our old content to MediaWiki. See Forge:MediaWiki for more about our setup.

Wikis work because they are doacracies.

William Hertling wrote a great summary (w/ references) of Ward Cunningham's talk on Wiki design principles.