Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning "quick," but that's not how it's used today. Now, it refers to web sites which allow users to create and edit ALL the content on said site. Keep reading to find out why you need to pay attention to this trend.
wiki wiki (Quick, Quick) -- Hawaiian phrase
All About Wikis
The user-generated content approach inherent in wikis is rapidly turning into the theme powering hundreds of web sites, and it may be defining Web 2.0 in a few years time. Already Wikipedia (which is pretty much the definitive wiki site) is expected by some to become the next major system used in information retrieval by users on the Internet.
Wiki is web 2.0 to the extreme. Most publishing websites expect users to generate some income or some level of "herd intelligence" to the system, or a way to improve the intelligence of a particular application by utilizing user contributions. Then they stand back and control the quality of the output. Arguably, a traditional web 2.0 platform is Google, whose PageRank algorithm is based on quantity and quality of links (something which defines the web but over which Google has no control). Google developed the application, let their crawlers run riot and continuously make sure that the results are not manipulated.
Wikipedia is run by wikimedia, and apart from a small army of volunteer editors, it is entirely based on user contributed content. Users write, users edit and users decide whether to add new pages or not. This is the premise of ALL wiki-powered sites. And wiki sites are predominantly publishing sites. In the past year several hundred wiki sites popped up randomly across the net, and (gasp!) newspapers are seriously considering turning over large sections of their sites to users in a wiki format. Just imagine, they're going to allow users to write, edit and determine what comes on and what does not! Venture capital firms are betting millions on companies that build tools for wiki sites, and I am wondering whether the wiki is going to be the next big web 2.0 formats for websites.
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