User:Lorenzarius/060428Presentation/Web 2.0, Wiki and Wikipedia

Web 2.0 and Wiki

“Web 2.0” is the second generation of the World Wide Web, characterized by user interactivity, community participation and information sharing. It provides a widely different experience than the traditional “Web 1.0” in which information is static and communication is mainly one-way.

One of the finest examples of the philosophy of Web 2.0 is a type of website called “wiki”. The word wiki comes from Hawaiian wiki wiki, which means quick or fast. In the context of the Web, wiki is a type of website that allows its users to modify its content very quickly and easily, usually facilitated with simple interface, simple syntax for editing and revision control. In fact, the features of wiki can be summarized as the following three points: “easy to use”, “easy to edit” and “easy to monitor”.

Easy to use: Simply put, a wiki is just like an ordinary website, except that it can be edited, therefore accessing a wiki requires nothing more than a web browser and a connection. The wiki web pages themselves are also easy to use, since hyperlinks are used extensively to link up other wiki pages, creating an extensive network of information.

Easy to edit: Just like reading a wiki page, editing a wiki page also requires only a web browser. The simplest wikis support text mode editing, similar to using any plain text editor (e.g. Microsoft Notepad). Formatting is often accomplished by using simple markup languages. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing is also being developed by various developers. Wikis with WYSIWYG mode can give an experience similar to using any word processor software.

Easy to monitor: Since wikis are dynamic in nature, it becomes important to track the revision history of a page. Most wikis log the editing history of a page; version comparison feature is also available. This means that any changes can be easily monitored and undone.

Wikipedia

One of the most famous wiki on the web is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a free, online, multilingual encyclopaedia collaboratively written by volunteers worldwide. It was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and is now operated by a non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (www.wikimediafoundation.org). Wikipedia is free in the sense of the GNU Free Documentation License, which is a copyleft license and basically allows anyone to use, modify and redistribute its content provided they are continued to be release under the same license.

As a part of open source movement, Wikipedia has attracted more and more people to join and as a result it has shown phenomenal growth since its creation as a tiny side project. Currently Wikipedia has more than 4,300,000 articles among its 200 language versions, and the English version (en.wikipedia.org) alone has over 1,200,000 articles. According to web traffic information provider Alexa.com, Wikipedia is among the top 20th most visited website. Wikipedia is also the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, as reported by Nielsen NetRatings.

Building an encyclopaedia by letting anyone to be its writers and editors seems to be a very indecent and unworkable proposal, amazingly however, this openness is one of the factors that makes Wikipedia work. “Nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something.” As everybody is invited to participate, not only could the content become more comprehensive, the accuracy could also be improved, as stated by Linus’s Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. In fact, in a December 2005 study by the scientific journal Nature, it was reported that science articles in Wikipedia were comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica: Wikipedia had an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contained three. One advantage of Wikipedia over traditional media is that it is a constantly evolving entity with dynamic content, so it could stay very much updated and also any errors discovered could be instantly fixed.

The Chinese version of Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002 and is the 12th largest version of Wikipedia. Its contributors come from all over the world but as expected are mainly from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In fact, the Hong Kong contributors are actually one of the most active communities and therefore information about Hong Kong is quite ample on Wikipedia. Hong Kong was even selected as the host city for the first Chinese Wikimedia Conference, a regional conference devoted to the Wikimedia projects in Chinese. The Conference will be held on 26th – 27th August in the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Uses of Wiki

Building an encyclopaedia is merely one of the many applications of wiki. There are in fact numerous different wiki softwares (or wiki engines) that have different features and are suitable for different purposes, and many of them are free. When choosing a wiki software, first of all you might want to take a look at what software and platform you currently have. For instance, MediaWiki (the wiki software behind Wikipedia, available at www.mediawiki.org) runs on MySQL and Apache. So if you’re already using those, it would be very easy for you to install MediaWiki. Secondly you want to look at what you want to do with a wiki. Do you need a rich and complex markup language, or actually a simple markup will do? Access control, user management, customizability and language support are other features that you could consider.

Wikis are ideal for collaborative writing given their characteristics introduced earlier. A wiki could very well be deployed as a support site, a knowledge or documentation repository, a channel for information sharing, a personal, group-oriented or project-oriented workspace and scratch sheet, or even a platform for discussion. The basic idea of a wiki is very simple: a website that can be edited; how a wiki can be used is only limited by our imagination.