WIKIS

If blogs are fundamentally a way of presenting a particular point of view, or thinking aloud and sharing your news and views with the wider community; a wiki (from the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’) is a quick and easy way of working together with others to write a book, an article, or a series of articles. A wiki is a website that allows its users to contribute, edit, structure and store content (in the form of text and/or images) and to save it to the web.

Perhaps the best example of the potential of a wiki - and the grandaddy of all wikis - is Wikipedia : the strapline for which is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Since its inception in 2001 the volunteer content providers and editors that contribute to Wikipedia have produced almost 4 million individual articles in many different languages. Although it has been criticised for the inconsistency of the quality of its content, Wikipedia is an astonishing achievement. It also provides support for the use of wikis to harness collective intelligence: even if professional organisations may have to exert a little more editorial control than Wikipedia.

Like the other web 2.0 tools the software to set up a wiki is often available free on the open Internet or in the form of open source software .

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