What is a Wiki anyway?

“A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring”. (Wikipedia)

Here are some thoughts from Meatball Wiki on why wiki works.

What this all means on a practical level is that if you are anal retentive like me (typos are the bane of my existence!) and you ever see something on the site that you wish were different, you can change it. Or if you wish that there was a link to another website that you find helpful, you can add it, and so on.

There's a good article about wikis at Linux Insider.

We like the wiki format at WikiFOIA since FOIA laws can change so quickly, a fluid website makes it possible to keep up. We also like this format since we know there's no way that we will be able to think of everything that deserves to be covered regarding FOIA, but if there are people all over the country letting us know what's going on, there is a better chance of keeping on top.

The word comes from Hawaiian for “quick”. The story is that Ward Cunningham, (the developer of WikiWikiWeb) was rushing to catch a flight in Hawaii and an airline employee recommended that he catch the “Wiki Wiki” bus in order to make it on time. He liked the sound of the word and its alliteration with “Web”, and the rest is history.

Here is a little history of WikiFOIA in particular.

Watch the 4-minute video posted below for a great, easy-to-follow and entertaining explanation.

Click To Play

There is some controversy about the trustworthiness of the wiki format. Critics of open-source wiki systems argue that these systems could be easily tampered with; while proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content and correct it. Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows:

We have yet to encounter malicious editing to WikiFOIA, and hope that that continues. However, we do have measures in place to protect the content of the site, such as the Acceptable Use Policy and page locks, just in case. We also reserve the right to bar editing based on IP address should problems develop.

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