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December 22, 2006

Wiki Defined

A Wiki is a web site that promotes the collaborative creation of content. Wiki pages can be edited by anyone at anytime. Informational content can be created and easily organized within the wiki environment and then reorganized as required (O’Neill, 2005). Wikis are currently in high demand in a large variety of fields, due to their simplicity and flexibility nature. Documentation, reporting, project management, online glossaries, and dictionaries, discussion groups, or general information applications are just a few a examples of where the end user can provide value (Reinhold, 2006). The major difference between a wiki and blog is that the wiki user can alter the original content while the blog user can only add information in the form of comments. While stating that anyone can alter content, some large scale wiki environments have extensive role definitions which define who can perform functions of update, restore, delete, and creation. Wikipedia, like many wiki type projects, have readers, editors, administrators, patrollers, policy makers, subject matter experts, content maintainers, software developers, and system operators (Riehle, 2006). All of which create an environment open to sharing information and knowledge to a large group of users

Posted by Todd at December 22, 2006 4:40 PM