Fancy a wiki?

What could you do with a collaborative web site?

Collaborative... anarchic... chaotic... open-ended... insecure... fluid... collective... self-correcting... egalitarian... inelegant... open... shared... user-vicious... interactive. They're all terms you'll hear applied to wikis.

A wiki is a group Web site. All those who are members of a wiki may add, edit and delete content on the site.

Wikis are editable on the fly: no need to load up a Web page editor, work on a copy of a page on your computer, then use FTP (file transfer protocol) to upload the changed version to the Web server. Instead, you edit in situ: the wiki software provides built-in editing capabilities so you can add or modify content directly from within your browser.

That capability makes a wiki attractive as a one-person solution as well as a group playpen. If you've ever worked on a Web site -- your own or someone else's -- you'll appreciate how time-saving such direct manipulation can be. Hence the name wiki. It's short for wikiwiki, Hawaiian for quick.

Unfortunately, not all is sweetness and light when it comes to wikis. In fact, there's quite often more sturm und drang than smooth, slick teamwork. Many wikis are nasty pieces of work to set up, a challenge to edit, and result in Web pages which look like throwbacks to HTML version 0.5. Many of the strengths of wikis can also be weaknesses. Collaboration can quickly spiral into chaos; open-endedness may lead to interminable screeds from participants; and the fluidity of the content may make the goal of the wiki that much harder to attain. Some wikis end up being all process and little achievement.

Workable wikis

The remarkable thing though, is that despite their apparent invitation to anarchy -- and maybe because of it -- wikis work.

Take the Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). This global encyclopedia which anyone may edit, is the largest scale wiki of them all. It has around 700,000 articles in the English version alone, with over 60,000 regular contributors and hundreds of thousands of "members" -- just add your name and choose an ID -- with editing rights. It's an inexhaustibly useful resource, constantly updated, highly readable and not at all hard on the eyes.

Wikipedia: the world's largest wiki.

Yes, it's subject to subversion, skewing and outright sabotage; some pages are targets of 'edit wars'. In fact, there's a Wikipedia article devoted to listing the most-vandalised pages in the encyclopedia, with articles on George Bush, abortion, the Bible and Michael Jackson all, unsurprisingly, favourite targets. But like most wikis, the Wikipedia is built upon the belief that the responsible participants will far outnumber the "trolls", and one of the inherent strengths of a wiki is that everyone is a moderator. Any one of the tens of thousands of reasonable editors can undo the damage done by saboteurs with little effort.

Checks and balances

It's not merely the ratio of builders to wreckers which keeps even large-scale wikis functioning. There are a number of ways to keep the helter skelter nature of wikis in check. Chief among these is versioning.

All wikis maintain a history of revisions and a stored copy of old versions of each page. So if a new user comes along and accidentally clobbers some content, an experienced user can check the revision history, see when and how things went wrong, and revert the wiki to an earlier state. The same process can be used as a defence against vandals.

By choosing someone to administer the wiki, you can also eject anyone who is deliberately disruptive, and ensure that corrections are made quickly. Wikipedia, for example, has over 500 experienced members who act as volunteer administrators. You can even put locks on particular pages to protect vulnerable content or completed work.

A wiki can be selective about membership, too. Need a shared workspace to create a funding proposal for your community organisation? Set up a members-only wiki and require log in.

Wiki options

Keeping contributors under control is only one of the challenges in using a wiki effectively. Finding a wiki which is easy to set up, easy to use, and looks good is equally challenging.

Fortunately, the choice of wikis has blossomed in the last year or two. If you think a wiki might be useful in your work or study or organisation, you have several options:

Start from scratch. If you have access to a Web server, you can download and install a wiki engine. Most wiki software is freely available; a lot of it will run on any Web host with PHP, Perl or another server-side scripting language. Some also require a database, such as MySQL, running on the server to store the wiki pages. Setting up your own wiki engine requires a fair amount of technical nous, but it gives you considerable control over the end result. There are over 100 wiki engines to choose from.

Let someone else host your wiki. This is the easy route to follow and probably the best option for clubs, community groups and any small organisation without the resources of a full-time tech bod. No setup fuss, no messy administration. The downside is that it restricts your control.

Join a wiki. There are thousands of existing public wikis. The recently revamped Wiki Index (http://wikiindex.com, formerly SwitchWiki) is the best place to start your search for one that suits. The revamp has made this site far easier to use and categorises wikis by topic, language, wiki 'engine' and status: from 'vibrant' to 'needs love' to 'inactive'.

Another way to track down an existing wiki on a topic dear to your heart is with a Google search. For example, if you're a cosmology buff, try searching for:

cosmology wiki -wikipedia -wiktionary -wikibooks

Or to dig up a gourmet's wiki:

cooking recipes food wiki -wikipedia -wiktionary -wikibooks

The '-wikipedia -wiktionary -wikibooks' on those search phrases is necessary in order to avoid the results list being swamped with entries from Wikipedia and the associated Wiktionary and Wikibooks; they tell Google to exclude results which include those words.

geekgirl tip: define your purpose

Like any Web site, before you start building a wiki make sure you have a clear idea of your goal. Many wikis founder not because they're hard to edit or don't look good, but because the reason for collaborating via a wiki has not been clearly defined. Establish a strong, common goal which can be aided by using a wiki -- the drafting of an organisation's constitution, for example -- and then build the wiki around that purpose.

As well as sites built entirely as wikis, some sites offer wikis as one of a range of tools. One example is Omidyar.net, a network for social activists and socially conscious businesspeople. Omidyar helps people connect via discussions, personal messaging and wikis (called 'workspaces'). Within Omidyar, there are workspaces devoted to sustainable living, world heritage conservation, cancer survivors, travel, micro-finance, eliminating genocide, fighting poverty and many other interests.

Choosing a wiki host

Undoubtedly the simplest way to start a private wiki, one suitable as a communal workspace for your office, business, organisation or family wiki, is to opt for one of the wiki hosting services. There are plenty to choose from and all you need to use one is a browser.

When choosing a wiki host, take these factors into consideration:

• Price. There are more free wiki hosting deals than commercial, but the free ones often include advertisements or restrict your options in other ways. Commercial wikis are often priced on a monthly per user basis. Those costs can add up.
• Looks. Before you sign up with any wiki host, take a look at some of the sample wikis. Although you may be able to adjust the look of your wiki to some extent, depending on the wiki engine on which it's built, many wikis are just plain ugly, and there's not too much you can do about them. If your wiki looks a mess, it will be hard to get people to participate.
• Ease of editing. Although wiki pages are Web pages, you don't need to know how to code HTML to edit them. That's a huge plus, because most people don't know HTML. Instead, each wiki has its own simplified markup code participants use to add or edit pages. The wiki engine then uses a layout template with the marked up code to generate the finished HTML page. The trouble is, there's no common markup standard for wikis and some wiki markup is much harder to learn than other 'dialects'. If you want to set up a wiki for average humans rather than techno-buffs, then look for a wiki which offers WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) markup. WYSIWYG editing is very much like working in a word processor and makes it easy for anyone to edit the wiki.
• Editing flexibility. Although it's great to have WYSIWYG editing capabilities, experienced users often prefer hand-coding the wiki page source because it provides more power and flexibility. Some wikis provide editing options: WYSIWYG for average users; direct coding for advanced users.
• Backup. What happens to your wiki if the host goes down? Look for a wiki which provides either online backup or offline (on your computer) or both.
• Security. Is a simple log on all you need in the way of security? How about page locking?

Other features to consider are RSS feed support from your wiki pages; file uploads and downloads; image display; the ability to display data in tables; user access levels; email digests; calendar support; and so on.

Next-gen wikis

Although wikis have been around since the mid-'90s, they've only really taken off in recent years. Only now are we seeing wikis show signs of real maturity. The development of the Wikipedia is a good example. There are also some adventurous wiki offshoots making the scene.

One curious wiki is Wikalong (www.wikalong.org). Wikalong is a Firefox extension. When you add it to the browser, it displays a sidebar in which you can write annotations for any Web site you visit and the annotations of other Wikalong users are displayed with yours. It's still in early beta development, but fascinating to use.

On the more polished end of the spectrum is JotSpot (www.jot.com), which styles itself 'the application wiki.' JotSpot is a hosted wiki, with WYSIWYG, XML and text markup editing, and customisable site templates. What makes it an 'application wiki'? It provides flexible form-building tools, which let you structure and organise data. Instead of being limited to text, images and simple tables, in JotSpot you can build interactive forms with pull-down menus, to do lists, calendar display, and integration with data from other Web sites. You can build a JotSpot application from your own Excel data, or grab a pre-fab app such as a call log or time and expense manager from the gallery.

wiki resources

JotSpot (www.jot.com) Wiki Index (http://wikiindex.com) Wikalong (www.wikalong.org) Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) How to start a wiki (http://tinyurl.com/3ju3) List of topic wikis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis) List of wiki engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software) Top Ten wiki Engines List (http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?TopTenWikiEngines)

  © 2006  Rose Vines, www.geekgirls.com