honorsTalk

What is a wiki?

Fundamentally, a wiki is just a type of website in which all of the members of a community can edit the content of the pages. If you follow this link, you can try out editing a practice page. Come back here when you're done.

So, the site's readers are also the site's authors and editors.

Another way to look at a wiki is as an electronic whiteboard. Just like the whiteboard in the hallway of your research lab, each person with access to the board can not only read it, but they can also add something or change what someone else wrote. A wiki has the usual advantages of that electronic documents have over physical ones: large storage capacity, word processing, full text search, internet access. But more importantly it provides two unique features:

• Revision history :A wiki, unlike most physical whiteboards, can remember all of its past versions. This means that if somebody comes by and erases something important or vandalizes the board, it's trivial for someone else to rollback those changes.

:Here's the revision history of the practice page.

• Recent Changes list

:A wiki can generate a report of all of the modifications to the text since your last visit.

:In addition to allowing you to keep up with new or changed content, this encourages group peer review of all of the changes to the collaborative document.

:[RecentChanges? This link goes to the page named "RecentChanges", which contains the Recent Changes list for this wiki].

Uses

Project management

:This is probably the most common use of wikis. Projects or labs often have have a variety of project documents; announcements, to-do lists, status summarizes of various subprojects, documentation, meeting agendas, or hints and resources for others in the project.

:Without wikis, nothing on a project site can be updated without the webmaster.

:The result is often stale, out-of-date websites, and the real business shifts to email lists. By allowing project documents to be jointly maintained by the whole group, wikis remove the webmaster bottleneck.

:This sort of wiki is often access-restricted (or edit-restricted) to those in the group.

Collaborative paper writing

:This is the most natural use for wiki, although it isn't very common yet.

:Rather than emailing versions of the paper back and forth, wiki allows you to edit a single document as if you and your coauthors were all standing around a computer together.

:This eliminates the headaches of keeping track of the latest revision and of keeping track of old copies of the document (because the wiki does that for you).

:Clearly, this would usually be done on a private site accessible only to the authors.

:I should mention that there are LaTeX? extensions to many popular wiki software packages.

Public wikis

:Some wikis are opened up to everyone on the World Wide Web. The result is a collaborative document that anyone can edit.