Wikis are often lumped in with other “Web 2.0” technologies like blogs, social networks, etc. This is also somewhat misleading. If you consider Web 2.0 to be defined as tools that encourage user participation, then a wiki would seem to fit. However, wikis have been around a lot longer than most of the other Web 2.0 technologies and could be considered to be a precursor for a lot of what we now consider “social media.”
Although I first started using wikis on a regular basis in 2006, it wasn’t until late in 2008 that I actually started to give any thought to where the technology came from and why it was called a wiki in the first place. Early on someone had told me that WIKI was actually an acronym that stood for “What I Know, Is,” which, if you think about it, is a profound and philosophical statement to make about a piece of software. In fact it turns out that this definition is more of a “backronym” – an acronym applied to an existing word.
Imagine my surprise when a little research for a conference presentation on wiki implementation turned up the fact that “wiki” doesn’t actually stand for anything. It isn’t an acronym. In fact, wiki is the Hawaiian word for “fast.”
The story goes that Ward Cunningham, creator of the first wiki site, was looking for a name to describe how quick and easy it was to set up this new style of website and remembered a counter clerk at Honolulu International Airport telling him to use the “wiki-wiki” shuttle bus.
Ward Cunningham’s first wiki application, known as WikiWikiWeb or WardsWiki, was installed in March 1995 at Cunningham’s object-oriented programming consulting company as a way to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. Although this first wiki was geared to programmers, others saw the potential and used the basic concept of online collaboration to build their own wiki engines and collaborative websites.
While perhaps the most public example of this is Wikipedia, until recently the real growth in the technology has been inside company firewalls rather than on the public World Wide Web. Many companies adopted wikis in their IT or engineering departments, somewhat mirroring Cunningham’s first application, and then expanded them to other areas. (For another example see Case Study 1: A Wiki-Driven Company.)
With the acceptance and growth of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter in recent years, many companies and organizations have come to realize the value of community contribution and online collaboration. Many of them have started to move some of their wiki technology from private wiki spaces behind a firewall to more open communities on the web. These examples, along with various special interest wikis, are promoting a model of user-generated content and feedback that is changing the way that companies do business.
I will be examining the concepts of user-generated content and feedback in Chapter 9, Harvesting the Information.
If there is one visible downside to wikis at the moment, it is that currently (late 2009/late 2010) there are so many different types of wiki software to choose from. A quick search on Wiki Matrix[WikiMatrix], a site that allows you to compare the functionality of various wikis, shows over 120 different wikis. In Chapter 3, Planting The Seed – Think Before You Implement, I will discuss how to decide which one is right for you.