Wikipedia

As most wikis allow the creation of hyperlinks to other sites and services, the addition of malicious hyperlinks, such as sites infected with malware, can also be a problem. Some wikis may be subject to external structures of governance which address the behavior of persons with access to the system, for example in academic contexts. Some wiki software allows administrators to prevent pages from being editable until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate. Trolling and cybervandalism on wikis, where content is changed to something deliberately incorrect or a hoax, offensive material or nonsense is added, or content is maliciously removed, can be a major problem. High editorial standards in medicine and health sciences articles, in which users typically use peer-reviewed journals or university textbooks as sources, have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis. Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified by a wiki’s community of users.

• Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted.
• A wiki (/ˈwɪki/ ⓘ WIK-ee) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser.
• Some companies use wikis as their collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning.
• Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users.
• Wiki implementations can provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages, such as a backlink feature which displays all pages that link to a given page.
• In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend among industries toward collaboration placed a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.

In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example Kingdom of France. To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained free links (called wikilinks), wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. For example, “Kingdom of France” as a page title would be written as “KingdomOfFrance”, and displayed as “Kingdom Of France”. Beginning with WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used camel case to name pages, which is when words in a phrase are capitalized and the spaces between them removed. The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations.
Some wiki engines offer a blacklist feature which prevents users from adding hyperlinks to specific sites that have been placed on the list by the wiki’s administrators. Wiki implementations retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert peer reviewers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they have analyzed. For example, in 2006 a German Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website, and users of vulnerable Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link had their systems infected with the worm. Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of pages to maintain quality. Wiki administrators maintain content and, through having elevated privileges, are granted additional functions (including, for example, preventing edits to pages, deleting pages, changing users’ access rights, or blocking them from editing). In this concept of wiki federation, in which the same content can be hosted and edited in more than one location in a manner similar to distributed version control, the idea of a single discrete “wiki” no longer made sense.

Wikipedia’s sister projects

The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page content, while others use a relational database, as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching. HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of Vannevar Bush, the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to “comment on and change one another’s text”.
Such a wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. The term city wiki is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. A city wiki or local wiki is a wiki used as a knowledge base and social network for a specific geographical locale. In academic contexts, wikis have also been used as project collaboration and research support royaldogs casino systems.

• In early wiki engines, when a page was displayed, any instance of a camel case phrase would be transformed into a link to another page named with the same phrase.
• The term city wiki is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region.
• Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of pages to maintain quality.
• In this concept of wiki federation, in which the same content can be hosted and edited in more than one location in a manner similar to distributed version control, the idea of a single discrete “wiki” no longer made sense.
• It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias.
• On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online Oxford English Dictionary.
• In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example Kingdom of France.

The edit history view in many wiki implementations will include edit summaries written by users when submitting changes to a page. The list displays metadata for each revision to the page, such as the time and date of when it was stored, and the name of the person who created it, alongside a link to view that specific revision. Disagreements between users over the content or appearance of pages may cause edit wars, where competing users repetitively change a page back to a version that they favor. Critics of publicly editable wikis argue that they could be easily tampered with by malicious individuals, or even by well-meaning but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content. On implementations where an administrator is able to restrict editing of a page or group of pages to a specific group of users, they may have the option to prevent anonymous editing while allowing it for registered users. Some wikis can filter the list to remove edits flagged by users as “minor” and automated edits.

Internal news publications

In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend among industries toward collaboration placed a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom. In addition to using the approach of soft security for protecting themselves, larger wikis may employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism. “Edit war” redirects here; not to be confused with Edit conflict.

Further reading

Wikis may allow any person on the web to edit their content without having to register an account on the site first (anonymous editing), or require registration as a condition of participation. Some wikis also implement patrolled revisions, in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate. A person willing to maintain pages will be alerted of modifications to them, allowing them to verify the validity of new editions quickly. System administrators are responsible for the installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. Wikis can also be created on wiki hosting services (also known as wiki farms), where the server-side software is implemented by the wiki farm owner, and may do so at no charge in exchange for advertisements being displayed on the wiki’s pages. On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

History

Traditionally, wikis offer free navigation between their pages via hypertext links in page text, rather than requiring users to follow a formal or structured navigation scheme. These stores are typically presented for each page in a list, called a “log” or “edit history”, available from the page via a link in the interface. Some wikis present users with an edit button or link on the page being viewed. Wikipedia is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, with each one pertaining to a specific language, making it the largest reference work of all time.

The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. These ideas include “featured articles”, the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short “stub” articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations. Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. The English Wikipedia currently has 54,334,804 registered accounts of which 811 are administrators. English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base.