What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a Web page that can be viewed and modified by anybody with a Web browser and access to the Internet. This means that any visitor to the wiki can change its content if they desire. While the potential for mischief exists, wikis can be surprisingly robust, open ended, collaborative group sites. Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet.
The first wikis appeared in the mid-1990s. Scientists and engineers used them to create dynamic knowledge bases. Wiki content could be immediately (and widely) viewed and commented on. Today, in addition to compiling information, faculty and staff in higher education use wikis as repositories for meeting notes/ agendas and other information.
What Is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is one of most popular Wikis and a free online encyclopedia. The name is a portmanteau of the Hawaiian word for quick, "wiki", and "encyclopedia". Actively updated in over 100 languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto, the English language Wikipedia covers millions articles. Wikipedia, founded in 2001 as a non-profit organization and supported mainly by donations, allows anyone with Internet access to edit its articles. The premise is that collective knowledge, which some call "open source" content, is every bit as valuable as professionally edited content. As a result, Wikipedia has become a hybrid encyclopedia.
The lack of language barriers, and the fact that anybody with an Internet connection and a web browser can access and edit its contents, has Wikipedia termed as a "sum of public human knowledge."
Can you Trust the User Edited Content?
A very common criticism of Wikipedia is its inconsistent and unauthoritative submission model. The encyclopedia allows anybody to edit its pages, even anonymously. To address this issue, and to ensure quality, accurate content, all submissions and edits are moderated and regulated by a staff of regular volunteers. However, all information learned from Wikipedia should be independently verified by interested parties, and citing Wikipedia as a reference work is usually frowned upon in most academic circles. It should be noted that in 2005 the scientific publication Nature performed a comparison of the accuracy of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, the leading print encyclopedia. It found that while the amount of errors per article in Wikipedia and Britannica were the same, the severity of errors in Wikipedia were worse.
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. And this is at the heart of how Wikipedia works. Because it has so many people swarming over it all the time errors and abuses of the system are all quickly picked up.
Indeed, research by IBM showed that acts of "vandalism" (i.e. people deliberately writing either rubbish or abusive comments) were normally cleared from the site within five minutes.
For example, at 23.23 on September 27 last year, a user under the name Hitler edited the entry on Judaism by proposing that it be put forward for a "Vote For Deletion" (i.e. it should be removed entirely from Wikipedia). He summarized his edit as "HOLOCAUST LOL" (Laughing Out Loud). At 23.29 another user removed this from the page. And at 23.44, "Hitler" was been banned indefinitely from using the site
Why is Wikipedia a success?
Even by the admission of its founder, the 38-year-old technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, it was a "completely insane idea": a free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to and anyone can edit. There is no editor, no army of proof readers and fact checkers; in fact, no full-time staff at all. It is, in other words, about as far from the traditional idea of an encyclopedia as you can get.
There are dozens of reasons why it shouldn't work, and it is still far from perfect, but in less than four years, it has grown to have more than 1 million entries written in 100 languages from Albanian to Zulu.
To its fans, it is a fantastic research resource - albeit one that you should use with caution; and an incredible example of what can be achieved by collaboration and cooperation over the internet. To its detractors - mostly those from the traditional world of encyclopedias and librarianship, it is barely worthy of the label "encyclopedia".
To put Wikipedia's achievements in numerical context, at the same time it was celebrating the publishing of its one millionth entry (a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag) in less than four years, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography launched its latest edition. It had taken 12 years to complete, yet contained a comparatively tiddly 55,000 biographies. It also cost some £25m to create. Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around £300,000.
The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day.
The truth is that Wikipedia is continuously evolving. There are now around 3,000 new entries being added each day (about 700-800 of which are in English); and as the site has got bigger, so has the amount of editing that takes place on it. This year, there was an average of 11 edits per article. The entry on the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been edited more than 250 times this year alone.
The most contested entry, though, is that of George Bush, which has caused so much controversy that it has been frozen from editing. It had had more than 500 edits in three months, and there are more than 13 pages of discussion about the entry.
Wikis is really a Conversation
To me, Wikis are conversations. It is a new step in real time online discussion. Or let me call it a ‘smart’ conversation in Web 2.0 where the correct information out numbers the users who want to manipulate communication. And till the time there are internet users who care about sharing accurate knowledge, wikis on various topics will continue to grow.
Some Interesting Wikis you can visit are:
WikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual.
Scholarpedia is an online wiki-based encyclopedia in which articles are written by invited experts.
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, culture and hypermedia.
Wikitravel is a Web-based project "to create an open content, complete, up-to-date, and reliable world-wide travel guide."
OpenWetWare is a wiki created on April 20, 2005. The mission of the site is "to support open research, education, publication, and discussion in biological sciences and engineering."
Sources: Wikipedia!! and news articles debating the same
