Wiki software
Encyclopedia
Wiki software is collaborative software
Collaborative software
Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...

 that runs a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

, i.e., a website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web page
Web page
A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...

s via a web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

. A wiki system is usually a web application
Web application
A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...

 that runs on one or more web server
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....

s. The content, including all current and previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system
File system
A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

 or a database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

.

Wiki software was invented and first created by programmer Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...

 in 1995. There are currently dozens of actively-maintained wiki engines, in a variety of programming languages, including both open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 and proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

 applications.

History

The first wiki application, WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first...

, was created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...

 in 1994 and launched on c2.com in 1995. "WikiWikiWeb" was also the name of the wiki that ran on the software, and in the first years of wikis' existence there was no great distinction made between the contents of wikis and the software they ran on, possibly because almost every wiki ran on its own customized software. The WikiWikiWeb software was later renamed "WikiBase".

Over the next 10 years, many more wiki applications were written, in a variety of programming languages. After 2005, there began to be a move toward increasing consolidation and standardization: many less-popular wiki applications were gradually abandoned, and fewer new applications were created. Relatively few of the wiki engines currently in use were created after 2006.

Wiki functionality has also been added to existing content management system
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

s, such as Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001, SharePoint is typically associated with web content management and document management systems, but it is actually a much broader platform of web technologies, capable of being configured into a wide...

 and Drupal
Drupal
Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and...

.

Types of usage

There are essentially three types of usage for wiki software: public-facing wikis with a potentially large community of readers and editors, private enterprise wikis for data management by corporations and other organizations, and personal wiki
Personal wiki
A personal wiki is a wiki maintained primarily for personal use. Personal wikis allow people to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without the need for collaboration by multiple users....

s, meant to be used by a single person to manage notes, and usually run on a desktop. Some wiki software is specifically geared for one of the usage types, while other software can be used for all three, but contains functionality, either in its core or through plugins, that help with one or more of the usage types.

Public wikis

Public wikis are wikis that can be read by anyone; usually (though not always), they can be edited by anyone as well, though sometimes registration is required. Among public wikis, MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

 is the dominant software: it powers the world's most popular public wiki, Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, as well as the most popular wiki farm, Wikia
Wikia
Wikia is a free web hosting service for wikis . It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki...

, and it is the most popular software in use on other public wikis as well. Other wiki engines used regularly for public wikis include MoinMoin
MoinMoin
MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine. The MoinMoin code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2, or any later version .A number of organizations use MoinMoin to run public wikis,...

 and PmWiki
PmWiki
PmWiki is wiki software written by Patrick R. Michaud in the PHP programming language. It is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.-Design focus:...

, along with many others.

Enterprise wikis

Enterprise
Enterprise software
Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software , is software used in organizations, such as in a business or government, contrary to software chosen by individuals...

 wiki software is software meant to be used in a corporate (or organizational) context, especially to enhance internal knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge is exchanged among people, friends, or members of a family, a community or an organization....

, with a greater emphasis on features like access control, integration with other software, and document management
Document management system
A document management system is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions created by different users . The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management...

. Most proprietary wiki applications specifically market themselves as enterprise solutions, including Confluence
Confluence (software)
Confluence is an enterprise wiki software. Written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments, Confluence is developed and marketed by Atlassian. Confluence is sold as either on-premises software or as a hosted solution...

, Socialtext
Socialtext
Socialtext Incorporated is a company based in Palo Alto, California that produces enterprise social software, comprising an integrated suite of web-based social software applications including microblogging, user profile, directories, groups, personal dashboards using OpenSocial widgets, and shared...

, Jive Engage, SamePage
SamePage
SamePage is an enterprise wiki application written in Java with a WYSIWYG user interface. Developed and marketed by eTouch Systems, SamePage is sold as a hosted/Software as a service or on-premise software solution for collaboration and knowledge management...

, and Traction TeamPage
Traction TeamPage
Traction TeamPage is a proprietary enterprise 2.0 social software product developed by Traction Software Inc of Providence Rhode Island.TeamPage is one of the first products in the enterprise blog and wiki market, with Traction release 1.0 shipped in 1999....

. In addition, some open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions, including Foswiki, which calls itself "the free and open source enterprise collaboration platform", and TWiki
TWiki
TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal...

, which calls itself "the Open Source Enterprise Wiki". Some open-source wiki applications, though they do not specifically bill themselves as enterprise solutions, have marketing materials geared for enterprise users, like Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

. Many other wiki applications have also been used within enterprises.

Among the many companies and government organizations that use wikis internally are Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

, Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, Intel, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 and the United States intelligence community
Intellipedia
Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community . It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006 and consists of three wikis running on JWICS, SIPRNet, and Intelink-U...

.

Within organizations, wikis may either add to or replace centrally-managed content management system
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

s. Their decentralized nature allows them, in principle, to disseminate needed information across an organization more rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository. Wikis can also be used for document management, project management
Project management
Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value...

, customer relationship management
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...

, enterprise resource planning
Enterprise resource planning
Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...

, and many other kinds of data management.

Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include:
  • Allow to glue information via quick-and-easy-to-create pages containing links to other corporate information systems, like people directories, CMS, applications, and thus build up knowledge bases.
  • Avoiding e-mail
    E-mail
    Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

     overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Conversely, only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden subscribers with many messages, regardless of relevance to particular subscribers. It is also very useful for the project manager to have all the communication stored in one place, which allows them to link the responsibility for every action taken to a particular team member.
  • Organizing information. Wikis allow users to structure new and existing information. As with content, the structure of data is sometimes also editable by users.
  • Building consensus. Wikis allow the structured expression of views disagreed upon by authors on a same page. This feature is very useful when writing documentation, preparing presentations and so on.
  • Access rights, roles. Users can be forbidden from viewing and/or editing given pages, depending on their department or role within the organization.
  • Knowledge management with comprehensive searches. This includes document and project management, as well as using a wiki as a knowledge repository useful during times of employee turnover, retirement and so on.

Personal wikis

Software that is specifically designed for running personal wikis includes NotePub
NotePub
NotePub is an online notepad that allows for private, public, and shared notes. NotePub is also an open purpose wiki without a markup language. Notes can include files and images, and can be linked to other notes within NotePub, or to external websites. Content is organized chronologically and with...

, Pimki
Pimki
Pimki is a personal information manager , written and maintained by Assaph Mehr, that was under development from 2004 to 2008. It is derived from the Ruby-based wiki software Instiki...

 and Tomboy
Tomboy (software)
Tomboy is a free and open-source desktop notetaking application written for Unix-like and Microsoft Windows operating systems, written in C# using Gtk#. Tomboy is part of the GNOME desktop environment, often for personal information management. Its interface is a notepad with a wiki-like linking...

. Other, more general, wiki applications have components geared for individual users, including MoinMoin, which offers a "DesktopEdition".

Editing

Most wiki software uses a special syntax, known as wiki markup, for users to format the text, instead of requiring them to enter in HTML. Some wiki applications also include a WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

 editor, either instead of or in addition to the wiki markup editing.

Hosted application

There are a variety of wiki hosting services, otherwise known as wiki farms, that host users' wikis on a server. Some wiki software is only available in hosted form: PBworks, Wetpaint
Wetpaint
Wetpaint is a Seattle, Washington-based company, founded in 2005, that hosts both user-generated and professionally created content. Wetpaint began as a wiki farm, hosting wikis using their own proprietary software. In 2010, the main site was rebranded as Wetpaint Entertainment, a website focused...

 and Wikispaces
Wikispaces
Wikispaces is a hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Launched in March 2005, Wikispaces is owned by Tangient LLC and is among the largest wiki hosts, competing with PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia, and Google Sites .Private wikis with advanced features for businesses, non-profits and...

 are all examples of wiki hosting services that run on code that is only available on those sites. Other wiki software is available in both hosted and downloadable form, including Confluence, Socialtext, MediaWiki (available on Wikia and EditThis.info, among other sites) and XWiki
XWiki
XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. XWiki Enterprise, the enterprise wiki edition, includes WYSIWYG editing, OpenOffice based document import/export, semantic annotations and tagging, and advanced permissions management.As an application...

.

Content-management features

Wiki software can include features that come with traditional content management system
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

s, such as calendars, to-do lists, blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s and discussion forums. All of these can either be stored via versioned wiki pages, or simply be a separate piece of functionality. Software that supports blogs with wiki-style editing and versioning is sometimes known as "bliki" software.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is an example of wiki software that is designed to support such features at its core. Many of the enterprise wiki applications, such as TWiki, Confluence and SharePoint, also support such features, as do open-source applications like MediaWiki and XWiki, via plugins.

Scripting

Some wiki applications let users embed scripting-style calls into wiki pages, which are processed by the wiki's parser and run either when the page is saved or when it is displayed. MediaWiki is one example of such an application.

Semantic annotation

Wiki software can let users store data via the wiki, in a way that can be exported via the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

, or queried internally within the wiki. A wiki that allows such annotation is known as a semantic wiki
Semantic Wiki
A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks...

. The current best-known semantic wiki software is Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki...

, a plugin to MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

.

Mobile access

Some wiki software has special handling for accessing by mobile devices, such as mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

s. This is usually done by displaying conservative HTML coding.

Offline viewing and editing

Various approaches to providing wiki functionality when the user is not online have been tried. For users who need to simply read the wiki's content when offline, a copy of the content can often be made easily; in the case of Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

s and printed versions have been made of parts of Wikipedia's content.

Allowing offline editing, however (where the changes are synchronized when the user is back online), is a much more difficult process. One approach to doing this is using a distributed revision control system as a backend of the wiki, in peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 stye. With this approach, there is no central store of the wiki's content; instead, every user keeps a complete copy of the wiki locally, and the software handles merging and propagating of changes when they are made. This is the approach taken by the ikiwiki
Ikiwiki
ikiwiki is a free, open source wiki application, designed by Joey Hess. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later...

 engine (which can use the distributed revision control system Git
Git (software)
Git is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on...

 as its back-end), and Code Co-op
Code Co-op
-Distinguishing features:Code Co-op is a distributed revision control system of the replicated type.It uses peer-to-peer architecture to share projects among developers and to control changes to files...

 (a distributed revision control system that includes a wiki component).

There has also been research done on allowing Wikipedia to be run as a decentralized wiki, and on modifying the application XWiki to function in this way.

See also

  • Collaborative editing
    Collaborative editing
    Collaborative editing is the practice of groups producing works together through individual contributions. Effective choices in group awareness, participation, and coordination are critical to successful collaborative writing outcomes. Most usually it is applied to textual documents or...

  • Collaborative writing
  • Comparison of wiki software
    Comparison of wiki software
    The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of wiki software packages.-General information:-Target audience:-Features 1:-Features 2:-Installation:-See also:* List of wiki software* List of wikis* Wiki farm...

  • Enterprise portal
    Enterprise portal
    An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal or corporate portal, is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries. It provides a secure unified access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and is designed...

  • Enterprise social software
    Enterprise social software
    Enterprise social software , comprises social software as used in "enterprise" contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication...

  • List of collaborative software
  • List of wikis
  • List of wiki software
  • Wikinomics
    Wikinomics
    Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and open-source technology, such as wikis, to be successful...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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