A wiki ( ) is a form of

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...

publication on the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal

knowledge base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. Ori ...

. Wikis are powered by

wiki software Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application ...

, also known as wiki engines. Being a form of

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

, these differ from other

web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

systems such as blog software or static site generators in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader. Wikis have little inherent structure, allowing one to emerge according to the needs of the users. Wiki engines usually allow content to be written using a

lightweight markup language A lightweight markup language (LML), also termed a simple or humane markup language, is a markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax. It is designed to be easy to write using any generic text editor and easy to read in its raw form. Lightwei ...

and sometimes edited with the help of a rich-text editor. There are dozens of different wiki engines in use, both standalone and part of other software, such as

bug tracking system A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those ...

s. Some wiki engines are

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

, whereas others are

proprietary {{Short pages monitor

Visual editing

While wiki engines have traditionally offered source editing to users, in recent years some implementations have added a rich text editing mode. This is usually implemented, using

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, as an interface which translates formatting instructions chosen from a toolbar into the corresponding wiki markup or HTML. This is generated and submitted to the server transparently, shielding users from the technical detail of markup editing and making it easier for them to change the content of pages. An example of such an interface is the

VisualEditor VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with ...

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...

, the wiki engine used by Wikipedia. WYSIWYG editors may not provide all the features available in wiki markup, and some users prefer not to use them, so a source editor will often be available simultaneously.

Version history

Some wiki implementations keep a record of changes made to wiki pages, and may store every version of the page permanently. This allows authors to revert a page to an older version to rectify a mistake, or counteract a malicious or inappropriate edit to its content. 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. The list displays

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

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. A diff (short for "difference") feature may be available, which highlights the changes between any two revisions.

Edit summaries

The edit history view in many wiki implementations will include ''edit summaries'' written by users when submitting changes to a page. Similar to the function of a log message in a revision control system, an edit summary is a short piece of text which summarizes and perhaps explains the change, for example "Corrected grammar" or "Fixed table formatting to not extend past page width". It is not inserted into the article's main text.

Navigation

Traditionally, wikis offer free navigation between their pages via

links in page text, rather than requiring users to follow a formal or structured navigation scheme. Users may also create

index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...

es or

table of contents A table of contents, usually headed simply Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list, usually found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page number ...

pages, hierarchical categorization via a

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

, or other forms of

ad hoc Ad hoc is a Latin phrase meaning literally 'to this'. In English, it typically signifies a solution for a specific purpose, problem, or task rather than a generalized solution adaptable to collateral instances. (Compare with ''a priori''.) Com ...

content organization. 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. Adding categories or tags to a page makes it easier for other users to find it. Most wikis allow the titles of pages to be searched amongst, and some offer full text search of all stored content.

Navigation between wikis

Some wiki communities have established navigational networks between each other using a system called ''WikiNodes''. A WikiNode is a page on a wiki which describes and links to other, related wikis. Some wikis operate a structure of ''neighbors'' and ''delegates'', wherein a neighbor wiki is one which discusses similar content or is otherwise of interest, and a delegate wiki is one which has agreed to have certain content delegated to it. WikiNode networks act as

webring A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among amateur web ...

s which may be navigated from one node to another to find a wiki which addresses a specific subject.

Linking to and naming pages

The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations. Beginning with the WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used

camel case Camel case (sometimes stylized as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation. The format indicates the separation of words with a single ...

to name pages, which is when words in a phrase are

capitalized Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (British English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term a ...

and the spaces between them removed. In this system, the phrase "camel case" would be rendered as "CamelCase". 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. While this system made it easy to link to pages, it had the downside of requiring pages to be named in a form deviating from standard spelling, and titles of a single word required abnormally capitalizing one of the letters (e.g. "WiKi" instead of "Wiki"). Some wiki implementations attempt to improve the display of camel case page titles and links by reinserting spaces and possibly also reverting to lower case, but this simplistic method is not able to correctly present titles of mixed capitalization. For example, "

Kingdom of France The Kingdom of France ( fro, Reaume de France; frm, Royaulme de France; french: link=yes, Royaume de France) is the historiographical name or umbrella term given to various political entities of France in the medieval and early modern period. ...

" as a page title would be written as "KingdomOfFrance", and displayed as "Kingdom Of France". To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained ''free links'', wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. The concept was given the name in its first implementation, in

UseModWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by Use ...

in February 2001. In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example Kingdom of France The Kingdom of France ( fro, Reaume de France; frm, Royaulme de France; french: link=yes, Royaume de France) is the historiographical name or umbrella term given to various political entities of France in the medieval and early modern period. .... This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines. It is typically possible for users of a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite the creation of those pages. Such links are usually differentiated visually in some fashion, such as being colored red instead of the default blue, which was the case in the original WikiWikiWeb, or by appearing as a question mark next to the linked words.

History

WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing it in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain

c2.com The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' orig ...

on March 25, 1995. Cunningham gave it the name after remembering a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the " Wiki Wiki Shuttle" bus that runs between the airport's terminals, later observing that "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web." Cunningham's system was inspired by his having used

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

's hypertext software HyperCard, which allowed users to create interlinked "stacks" of virtual cards. HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...

, the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text." Cunningham says his goals were to link together people's experiences to create a new literature to document programming patterns, and to harness people's natural desire to talk and tell stories with a technology that would feel comfortable to those not used to "authoring". Wikipedia became the most famous wiki site, launched in January 2001 and entering the top ten most popular websites in 2007. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication,

intranet An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in c ...

s, and documentation, initially for technical users. 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 A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together. Groups of people * Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity * Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic iden ...

. On March 15, 2007, the word ''wiki'' was listed in the online ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...

''.

Alternative definitions

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the word "wiki" was used to refer to both user-editable websites and the software that powers them, and the latter definition is still occasionally in use. By 2014, Ward Cunningham's thinking on the nature of wikis had evolved, leading him to write that the word "wiki" should not be used to refer to a single website, but rather to a mass of user-editable pages or sites so that a single website is not "a wiki" but "an instance of wiki". 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.

Implementations

The software which powers a wiki may be implemented as a series of

scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

which operate an existing

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...

, a standalone

application server An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a ...

that runs on one or more web servers, or in the case of

personal wiki A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users. Personal wiki softwa ...

s, run as a standalone application on a single computer. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page content, while others use a

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

, as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching.

Hosting

Wikis can also be created on

wiki hosting service A wiki hosting service, or wiki farm, is a server or an array of servers that offers users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis. Wiki farms are not to be confused with wiki "families", a more generic t ...

s (also known as ''wiki farms''), where the

server-side In the client–server model, server-side refers to programs and operations that run on the server. This is in contrast to client-side programs and operations which run on the client. General concepts Typically, a server is a computer application ...

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. Some hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis requiring authentication to access. Free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page.

Trust and security

Access control

The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. System administrators are responsible for the installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. 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).

Controlling changes

Wikis are generally designed with a ''

soft security Soft security usually refers to security that protects something from harm in quiet and unobtrusive ways, often invisibly and after the fact, rather than with visible barriers before the fact. Soft security can refer to immediate security measures ...

'' philosophy in which it is easy to correct mistakes or harmful changes, rather than attempting to prevent them from happening in the first place. This allows them to be very open while providing a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. Most wikis offer a ''recent changes'' page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame. Some wikis can filter the list to remove edits flagged by users as "minor" and automated edits. The version history feature allows harmful changes to be reverted quickly and easily. Some wiki engines provide additional content control, allowing

remote monitoring and management Remote monitoring and management (RMM) is the process of supervising and controlling IT systems (such as network devices, desktops, servers and mobile devices) by means of locally installed Software agents, agents that can be accessed by a manag ...

of a page or set of pages to maintain quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be alerted of modifications to them, allowing them to verify the validity of new editions quickly. Such a feature is often called a ''watchlist''. Some wikis also implement ''patrolled revisions'', in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate. A ''flagged revisions'' system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed. 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. 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.

Trustworthiness and reliability of content

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. Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified by a wiki's community of users. 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. Wiki implementations retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

ers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they have analyzed.

Security

Trolling and

cybervandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The term f ...

on wikis, where content is changed to something deliberately incorrect or a

hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...

, offensive material or nonsense is added, or content is maliciously removed, can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites it is possible for such changes to go unnoticed for a long period. 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. For example, on Wikipedia the bot ''ClueBot NG'' uses

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to identify likely harmful changes, and can revert them within minutes or even seconds. 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. 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. 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.

Harmful external links

As most wikis allow the creation of hyperlinks to other sites and services, the addition of malicious hyperlinks, for example to sites infected with

malware Malware (a portmanteau for ''malicious software'') is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, depri ...

, can also be a problem. For example, in 2006 a German Wikipedia article about the

Blaster Worm Blaster (also known as Lovsan, Lovesan, or MSBlast) was a computer worm that spread on computers running operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000 during August 2003. The worm was first noticed and started spreading on August 11, 2003. The ...

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 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.

Communities

Applications

The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic. Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Memory Alpha,

Wikivoyage Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has ...

, and previously

Susning.nu Susning.nu (literally meaning "") was a Swedish language wiki website created by Lars Aronsson (also the founder of Project Runeberg) in 2001 and active until 2009. In its first three years, Susning.nu ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit. ...

, a Swedish-language knowledge base. Medical and health-related wiki examples include Ganfyd, an online collaborative medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. Many wiki

communities A community is a Level of analysis, social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place (geography), place, Norm (social), norms, religion, values, Convention (norm), customs, or Identity (social science), identity. Communiti ...

are private, particularly within enterprises. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to help produce software documentation. A study of corporate wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work. From a study of thousands of wiki deployments, Jonathan Grudin concluded careful stakeholder analysis and education are crucial to successful wiki deployment. In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. Wikis can be used for

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. Th ...

. Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing,

strategic planning Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the st ...

, departmental documentation, and committee work. 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. Wikis have found some use within the legal profession and within the government. Examples include the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

Intellipedia Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006. Intellipedia consists of three wi ...

, designed to share and collect intelligence assessments, DKosopedia, which was used by the

American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

to assist with review of documents about the internment of detainees in

Guantánamo Bay Guantánamo Bay ( es, Bahía de Guantánamo) is a bay in Guantánamo Province at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the largest harbor on the south side of the island and it is surrounded by steep hills which create an enclave that is cut off ...

; and the wiki of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, used to post court rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexa ...

operates

Peer-to-Patent The Peer To Patent project is an initiative that seeks to assist patent offices in improving patent quality by gathering public input in a structured, productive manner. Peer To Patent is the first social-software project directly linked to decisio ...

, a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to the examination of pending patent applications.

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park.

Cornell Law School Cornell Law School is the law school of Cornell University, a private Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. One of the five Ivy League law schools, it offers four law degree programs, JD, LLM, MSLS and JSD, along with several dual-deg ...

founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called

Wex Wex is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopaedia, intended for broad use by "practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law". It is sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute ("LII ...

, whose growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit. In academic contexts, wikis have also been used as project collaboration and research support systems.

City wikis

A ''city wiki'' or ''local wiki'' is a wiki used as a

and

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

for a specific geographical locale. The term city wiki is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. Such a wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. Such highly localized information might be appropriate for a wiki targeted at local viewers, and could include: * Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centers * Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop * Statistical information about a specific road in a city * Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor * A biography of a local mayor and other persons

Growth factors

A study of several hundred wikis in 2008 showed that a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth; access controls restricting editing to registered users tends to reduce growth; a lack of such access controls tends to fuel new user registration; and that a higher ratio of administrators to regular users has no significant effect on content or population growth.

Legal environment

Joint authorship of articles, in which different users participate in correcting, editing, and compiling the finished product, can also cause editors to become tenants in common of the copyright, making it impossible to republish without permission of all co-owners, some of whose identities may be unknown due to pseudonymous or anonymous editing. Some copyright issues can be alleviated through the use of an open content license. Version 2 of the

GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the r ...

includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing, and

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

licenses are also popular. When no license is specified, an implied license to read and add content to a wiki may be deemed to exist on the grounds of business necessity and the inherent nature of a wiki. Wikis and their users can be held liable for certain activities that occur on the wiki. If a wiki owner displays indifference and forgoes controls (such as banning copyright infringers) that they could have exercised to stop copyright infringement, they may be deemed to have authorized infringement, especially if the wiki is primarily used to infringe copyrights or obtains a direct financial benefit, such as advertising revenue, from infringing activities. In the United States, wikis may benefit from

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act Section 230 is a section of Title 47 of the United States Code that was enacted as part of the United States Communications Decency Act and generally provides immunity for website platforms with respect to third-party content. At its core, Secti ...

, which protects sites that engage in "

Good Samaritan In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions. Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil and is of interest in the study of ethics, morality, ph ...

" policing of harmful material, with no requirement on the quality or quantity of such self-policing. It has also been argued that a wiki's enforcement of certain rules, such as anti-bias, verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no-original-research policies, could pose legal risks. When

defamation Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defini ...

occurs on a wiki, theoretically, all users of the wiki can be held liable, because any of them had the ability to remove or amend the defamatory material from the "publication". It remains to be seen whether wikis will be regarded as more akin to an

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

, which is generally not held liable due to its lack of control over publications' contents, than a publisher. It has been recommended that trademark owners monitor what information is presented about their trademarks on wikis, since courts may use such content as evidence pertaining to public perceptions, and they can edit entries to rectify misinformation.

Conferences

Active conferences and meetings about wiki-related topics include: * Atlassian Summit, an annual conference for users of Atlassian software, including

Confluence In geography, a confluence (also: ''conflux'') occurs where two or more flowing bodies of water join to form a single channel. A confluence can occur in several configurations: at the point where a tributary joins a larger river (main stem); o ...

. * OpenSym (called WikiSym until 2014), an

academic conference An academic conference or scientific conference (also congress, symposium, workshop, or meeting) is an event for researchers (not necessarily academics) to present and discuss their scholarly work. Together with academic or scientific journals an ...

dedicated to research about wikis and open collaboration. * SMWCon, a bi-annual conference for users and developers of

Semantic MediaWiki Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic search ...

. * TikiFest, a frequently held meeting for users and developers of

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware or simply Tiki, originally known as TikiWiki, is a free and open source Wiki-based content management system and online office suite written primarily in PHP and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LG ...

. * Wikimania, an annual conference dedicated to the research and practice of

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

projects like Wikipedia. Former wiki-related events include: *

RecentChangesCamp RecentChangesCamp was an unconference focused on wikis, held from 2006 to 2012. It was named after the "recent changes" feature that is found in most wikis. RecentChangesCamp followed an Open Space model in having a program that was determined on ...

(2006–2012), an

unconference An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top ...

on wiki-related topics. * RegioWikiCamp (2009–2013), a semi-annual unconference on "regiowikis", or wikis on cities and other geographic areas.

Notes

References

Sources

External links

*
''Exploring with Wiki''
an interview with Ward Cunningham * Murphy, Paula (April 2006)

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

.
Ward Cunningham's correspondence with etymologists
* WikiIndex an
WikiApiary
directories of wikis
WikiMatrix
a website for comparing wiki software and hosts * {{Authority control Articles containing video clips Hawaiian words and phrases Self-organization Social information processing