Wikis

History

The idea behind wikis was developed long before social software was coined. In 1994 Ward Cunningham published the WikiWikiWeb, a website on which anybody could easily create and edit pages without having to know hypertext markup language [HTML] (Casarez, Cripe, & Weckerle, 2009, p. 39). Following his programming principle of trying to create the simplest thing that could possibly work he had created a software format which would enable the creation of the world’s biggest encyclopedia and one of the 10th most frequented websites in the internet: Wikipedia.org (cp. Alexa 2009).

Definition & Description

A short definition for a wiki is given by Newman & Thomas who state that “a wiki is a system of web pages that can be easily created, edited and viewed” (Newman & Thomas, 2008, p. 180). With this definition they emphasize the easiness in using a wiki and thus contrast the process of creating and editing a wiki page to creating or editing a page the traditional way. Before the emergence of wikis, an author always had to create or make changes locally on his computer writing websites in HTML and then upload the files onto a web-server. Another differentiator of wikis towards traditional websites is that anybody can edit them making a wiki a platform for collaboration as the following definition highlights: “A wiki is web-based software that allows all viewers of a page to change the content by editing the page online in a browser. This makes wiki a simple and easy to use platform for cooperative work on text and hypertexts” (Ebersbach, Glaser, & Heigl, 2008, p. 12). In this way, a wiki basically is an accumulation of interlinked pages (or articles) within a website. The strength of a wiki lies as indicated by Newman & Thomas (2009) lies in the low effort and minimal technical requirements to create and edit pages and the lack of access restrictions which in combination leads to a great mass of potential editors and viewers. Usually a wiki has a certain topic or purpose which in the case of Wikipedia is very general (store and make accessible the knowledge of the world) but can be more narrow like for wikitravel.org which provides information about holiday destinations and recipeswiki.org which is about sharing recipes. In contrast to traditional websites, which had a taxonomic structure and a hierarchical navigation, the structure of a wiki is non15 linear. Users navigate through a wiki using the integrated search function and by clicking on highlighted words within articles which are linked to other wiki-pages. An exception to the non-linear navigation is made for a set of special pages which have direct links that are always visible in the navigation bar of the wiki. This set usually contains a search page, a recent changes page, a help page and a so called sandbox which is an editing space for learning how to create and edit pages (Ebersbach, Glaser, & Heigl, 2008, p. 20).

Social

With its concept of free read and write access for anyone even anonymously the very idea of a wiki is social. Also the underlying philosophy which Casarez et al. (2009) identify as “to favor simplicity and remove all barriers to contribute” (p. 40) is based on the idea of enabling people to share their knowledge. Very social features of wikis are meta-talk and discussion pages. If there are conflicting views about the content of a wiki page they can be discussed and resolved in the attached discussion page. As wikis focus on information and lack the ability for users to display themselves, it could be argued that they are less social then weblogs or social networking services but any increase in contribution barriers like a mandatory registration process for example would go against the fundamental ideas of a wiki and consequently undermine its social nature.

Enablers

As cross links between wiki pages are a core feature of a wiki and besides search act as the main function for navigation creators and editors of wiki pages are encouraged to make heavy use of them. To support this, the creation of links is facilitated by the wiki’s ability to automatically create a link for any word set in squared brackets (standard wiki text syntax) to a page with the same title or if such a page does not exist it will creates a new page with title (CMS, 2009, p. 22). While wiki text was already an enormous improvement in terms of usability and simplicity compared to HTML the emergence of What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors gave another boost to wiki use. In such an editor people can edit texts in window with a simple text editor and do not have to rely on any special syntax any more. With this editor, really anybody who has used a computer before can edit, structure and layout a wiki page. Even the creation of tables, which formerly demanded extensive knowledge of wiki markup language is now possible for unskilled users. Maybe the most important features beside the core 16 functionality of a wiki are related to change monitoring. Because everybody can edit the content of a page it is impossible for editors and users to keep track of changes manually. Choate (2005) points out that wikis have automatic version control and a repository service which saves older versions when a page is edited to deal with this problem. On the history page which is attached to each wiki page any user can see the different versions of the page. With the rollback function the user can review old versions and with the compare functions he or she can see two page versions side by side with a color highlighting of the changes. In addition to version control, change notifications support users in monitoring changes. On a general level changes can be seen on the recent change page but wikis also offer the possibility to watch a certain page, meaning that one will be notified if changes are made on a particular page. There a different ways of being notified from a personal watch list, where changes of all monitored pages appear, to email notifications and Really Simple Syndication feeds (RSS feeds will be explained under Weblogs). Good wikis can distinguish between minor changes like typos and substantial changes and they also have a “patrolled”- function, which shows that a page has been checked for mistakes by a person already. Other factorsf which are emphasized in the CMS report (2009) include the possibility to create simple templates for wiki-pages, the automatic generation of a list with incoming links, the ability to create a wiki page by sending an email to the wiki system (website), the lack of content management workflows and the ability to export wiki pages as pdfor word documents.

Enterprise considerations

To prove the power of wikis people usually and rightly refer to Wikipedia. It is important though, that Wikipedia’s success is due to the conditions in the environment of the (public) internet. Wikis in the open web have a massive potential user group that include everybody on the world who has internet access. Still, most of the set up wikis in the internet remain unused with Wikipedia being the exception to the rule. It seems that Wikipedia with its broad and appealing purpose attracted the critical mass of contributors in order to take off. Nevertheless the active participation is reported to be less than one percent of the whole audience with an elite group of 100 hundred power contributors at the core, about 4000 other active and 80 000 regular contributors around that (Casarez et al. 2009, p. 38f.). The use of wikis within enterprises has different conditions and requirements. While the number of participants is limited to the number of employees, companies have more options to promote wiki use and can incorporate them into the everyday work processes of employees. In order to avoid organizational chaos, which may arise due to the ad-hoc structure of wikis companies should provide training, governance and stewardship (CMS 2009, p. 30). In contrast to open wikis companies will want a certain degree of hierarchy within a wiki with different workspaces, authentication and rights management.

Wikis in the Social Software Map

A wiki is platform for collaboration which provides users with the ability to share their knowledge. The social operations involved are collaborating and sharing and the content is mainly information. A wiki can be used to share files by attaching them to a wiki page but this is rather an additional feature. Identity and communication have no to very little significance with wikis.