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Wiki, a Shared Blog for the Corporate World

Writable webs empower people to share knowledge effectively and to be more productive

• Wiki, a Blog (Weblog) for groups: Communities can organize and share content in an organic and free manner
• If extended with the right set of functionality, a Wiki can be applied to corporate groups to schedule, manage, document, and support their daily activities

Conference talk at VCWI 2005 IT Seminar in Eindhoven, Sept 2005BR ?????, Jun Hu BR MailTo(j.hu@tue.nl)BR Slides available from [http://id00243.id.tue.nl/JunHu/WikiYourWeb]

What is a Wiki?

• WikiWikiWeb = Writable Web

  • As quick to contribute as e-mail
  • As easy to use as a website

• WardCunningham implemented the original WikiWikiWeb in 1995 to collaborate on software patterns

• Inspired by HyperCard; some call it a Blog for groups

• Wiki design principles:

  Open

  Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit

  Incremental

  Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet

  Organic

  The structure and text content of the site is open to editing and evolution

  more

  WikiDesignPrinciples

What is a Wiki? (cont.)

• The original WikiWikiWeb has these features:

  • Read-write web, every page can be edited using just a browser
  • HTML form based editing
  • Pages are served dynamically

  • Pages are linked automagically with camel case words LikeThis or words ["Like This"]

  • Simple markup, no need to learn HTML

• Try the WikiSandBox

• Over 100 Wiki engines based on the original Wiki idea, mostly open source
• Wiki has geek appeal
• Mainly used by Internet communities and academia

Blogs and Wikis

• Blog: (Weblog)
  1. Key: Easy to publish opinions of individual in regular intervals
  2. Media to express individual voice
  3. "Post media" (like e-mail), sometimes with feedback and talkback

  4. Usually hosted service (e.g. Six Apart's [http://www.typepad.com/ TypePad])

• Wiki: (WikiWikiWeb)

  1. Key: Easy to create and refactor on content owned by group
  2. Media to express group voice, deemphasizing identity of individuals
  3. "Refactor media", content may change at any time
  4. Usually open source software, installed on own server
• Some Blogs have Wiki-like features, some Wikis have Blog capabilities
  • Merge over time?

Wiki Tools

• Open Source WikiEngines: Download and install

  • MoinMoin: Used by internet communities (Python)

  • [http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl UseModWiki]: Used by internet communities (Perl)

  • [http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/ PhpWiki]: Popular Wiki (PHP)

  • [http://www.flexwiki.com/ FlexWiki]: .NET based (C#)

  • [http://snipsnap.org/ SnipSnap]: Wiki + Blog (Java)

• Hosted Wiki services: Wiki farms

  • [http://www.socialtext.com/products/workspace/ Socialtext Workspace]: Open source Wiki (Kwiki) with Blog extensions; for corporate use ($$$)

  • [http://www.editme.com/ EditMe]: Simple Wiki and Blog ($4.95/month)

  • [http://www.teamflux.com/FrontPage Teamflux]: Simple Wiki ($20/quarter/person)

• Wiki appliance: Wiki in a preconfigured box

  • [http://www.socialtext.com/products/appliance/ Socialtext Appliance]: Based on Kwiki with some proprietary extensions

Wikipedia

• [http://www.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia]: Wiki + Encyclopedia

• A free encyclopedia that is being written collaboratively by its readers
• Project started in January 2001
• The most active public Wiki: There are over 290,000 articles in English; more in 50 other languages

• Anyone in the world can edit any page.

• Doesn't that lead to chaos?

  • Domain experts contribute
  • Well defined policies for contributing and handling content
  • Graffiti gets removed quickly (rollback available)

    • IBM's [http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/ research] on history flow of articles ([http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm gallery])

• Content can be freely distributed and reproduced under the terms of the [http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License, GNU Free Documentation License]