Public Wikis: Sharing Knowledge Over the Internet
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Technical Communication Wiki : Chapter 2 This page last changed on Apr 15, 2009 by kjp15. Public Wikis: Sharing Knowledge over the Internet What is a public wiki? A public wiki refers to a wiki that everyone can edit, that is, it is open to the general public on the Internet with or without a free login. Anyone is welcome to add information to the wiki, but contributors are asked to stay within the subject area, policies, and standards of the particular wiki. Content that does not relate to the subject or is not of good quality can and will be deleted by other users. Also, if a contributor makes a mistake or a typo, other users will eventually correct the error. Open collaboration by anyone means that multiple articles can be written very fast simultaneously. And, while there may be some vandalism or edit wars, quality of the articles will generally improve over time after many editors have contributed. The biggest public wiki in the world, with over 75,000 contributors, is Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" [1]. Wikipedia has over 2.8 million articles in the English version, which includes over 16 million wiki pages, and is one of the top ten most popular websites in the United States [2]. There are versions of Wikipedia in ten different languages, and articles in more than 260 languages. Wikipedia is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation [3] which pays a small group of employees and depends mainly on donations. There are also over 1,500 volunteer administrators with special powers to keep an eye on editors and make sure they conform to Wikipedia's guidelines and policies. Contributions made to most public wikis remain the property of their creators and are formally licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The GFDL license ensures the content is freely distributable and reproducible. For example, articles on Wikipedia can be copied, modified, and re-distributed provided that the copy is made available for free and acknowledges the authors (usually by providing a link back to the article). This principle is sometimes called copyleft and is similar to the way free software is licensed and distributed [4]. However, care should be taken when copying articles from Wikipedia because some users have uploaded copyrighted material, against Wikipedia's policies, and copying that material can violate the copyright of its owner. Eventually, the copyright material will be detected and removed by Wikipedia editors. Examples of public wikis While Wikipedia is the most well-known public wiki, it is certainly not the only one. The following describes several large public wikis that anyone can contribute to. Wikitravel is a free, collaborative, world-wide travel guide that contains over 21,000 destination guides and articles. Inspired by the success of Wikipedia, Wikitravel was started in 2003 and designed to give travelers more up-to-date and complete information than can be found in a book. Anyone can sign up and become a Wikitraveller, edit and contribute to articles, or ask questions in the Travellers' pub. Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 1 WikiHow is a collaborative wiki project with the goal of building the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. The free wiki contains over 52,000 articles on an eclectic range of subjects including, "How to survive a long fall," "How to plant a tree," and "How to deal with a difficult daughter-in-law." Articles are organized in categories such as Arts & Entertainment, Family Life, Health, Relationships, Food & Entertaining, and Computers & Electronics which are broken down into subcategories, such as Books, Costumes, Movies, and Music, which are further broken down into more specific categories ,such as Bands and DJs, Musical Instruments, Music Listening and Appreciation, and Songs and Song Writing. Wikia Entertainment Network contains thousands of entertainment-related wikis that anyone can edit, including wikis dedicated to movies, TV, books, and comics. The biggest entertainment wikis have over 5,000 pages and include: • Wookieepedia: over 65,000 pages about Star Wars. • Marvel Comics: over 49,000 articles on Marvel comics and characters, including a Strength Scale which is an attempt to rank all of the Marvel characters in order of raw physical strength, with references to support their conclusions. Many of the pages seem to be locked to prevent editing. • Memory Alpha: over 29,000 pages, this is the definitive, accurate encyclopedia for everything related to Star Trek. • Muppet Wiki: over 18,000 pages about Jim Henson and the Muppets. Requires the user to login to edit pages. • Klingon Dictionary: over 7,000 articles on the fictional language spoken by the Klingons on Star Trek. • Lostpedia: over 5,000 articles about the popular TV show Lost, complete with spoiler warnings. Wikia also hosts Wikia Gaming which has hundreds of wiki fansites for Xbox, PS3, Wii, PC, and handheld gamers, and a variety of other wikis such as the Recipes Wiki (with 48,000 recipes including 190 dog food recipes) and the Psychology Wiki (with over 25,000 articles in 17 subjects related to psychology). There are also "hybrid" websites that contain some regular webpages with fixed content and some wiki pages where readers can share their knowledge and experience. An example is Dave's Garden which is a website for beginning and experienced gardeners around the world. There are featured articles on fixed webpages, hundreds of forums on home and gardening topics where readers can share advice and knowledge, thousands of gardening blogs and the opportunity for users to create their own blog, and several wikis where gardeners can share their expertise and information about plants, bugs, birds, and insects. Another form of public wikis are industry-oriented wikis, such as KeyContent.org and the Carolina Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Both are non-profit organizations that have wikis for discussions and articles related to technical communication. The mission of KeyContent is to provide a place for users to instantly publish articles and express their views about the technical communication profession. Currently, there are over 180 articles with the oldest dating back to 2004 on subjects such as social networking, wiki-fying documents, humor about XML, and news of the profession. Since KeyContent has free and open registration for industry professionals, a basic guide for editing the KeyContent wiki is given later in this chapter. The STC has updated their website to use a wiki-based content management system which allows members, after logging in, to edit and update some of the pages including sharing their resumes. Access to the STC wiki is limited to dues-paying members of the organization and many of the pages are locked, allowing users only to monitor a page and to view the history of the page (click on the history tab), but not edit the page. Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 2 Software used by public wikis Wikipedia, Wikitravel, wikiHow, and Wikia all use the free, open-source MediaWiki software, so they share a similar appearance. MediaWiki was originally written for use on Wikipedia but is now used by many other wikis. Editing and creating pages is accomplished in a similar way for all of these sites. At the top of each page, there are tabs that say Article, Edit or Edit this page, Discuss or Discussion, and History. The tabs on Wikia may look different, but the same tabs are present. If a page is locked for editing, such as the main pages of the sites, the Edit tab will not appear. For a locked page on Wikia, Edit this page will be replaced with View source which shows the wiki markup but does not let you change it. There are many reasons to lock a page from editing including protecting the main information about a wiki or to settle controversies and prevent constant bickering over the content. Many of the public wikis give you the option of editing pages anonymously or creating an account. To register an account is free and your user ID will show up on the history page when you make edits. If you don't login, either "anonymous" or your IP address will show up. On wikiHow, the contributors to an article are listed at the bottom of the page. If readers click on a name, they are sent to the author's About Me page which gives details about the author and lists the articles they have written or to which they have contributed. Each of the sites allows editing and formatting using the wiki markup language and a Rich Text or WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface, usually at the same time. For example, users can click a button to make text bold or they can type in the markup language (''') to make text bold. On wikiHow, the user has the option of using Guided Editing, which has sections such as Introduction, Steps, Video, Tips, Warnings, Related wikiHow articles, and Sources and Citations that the user can fill out using the wiki markup language. Then, there is a button called Advanced Editing at the top of the page, where the user can use a Rich Text interface for formatting, but the sections do not appear. While the Rich text toolbar for each site is slightly different, they all are similar to the toolbar on Wikipedia which is shown in Figure 2-2 in the following section. KeyContent.org and STC Carolina use TikiWiki software for their wikis. TikiWiki is more than just wiki software; it is a content management system that includes many other tools as well, such as blogs, calendars, and forums.