Wikis
The "Wiki" is obviously best known for this type of software's most famous user, Wikipedia, an online collaborative encyclopaedia. But Wiki software, first developed in 1995 by Ward Cunningham (Mincic-Obradovic, 2009, p. 6) can be also be used as corporate knowledge sharing environments, or even as the engine that drives a "normal" website. In fact, if you accept my definition of a CMS being a "web based website authoring and publishing tool", the Wiki was surely the first ever CMS that brought web page creation to the non programmer.
The key feature of the Wiki is its use of "wiki markup" - a markup language "a modern system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text" ("Markup language", n.d.) that attempts to provide basic presentation formatting (and linking) using a system (arguably) easier to learn than html. The wiki engine then translates this markup into html for display in a browser. As is typical with OSS tools though, the need was established for a WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editor, and "plugins" that allow for such are now common with most wiki software.
Another key feature of the wiki is the ability to allow anyone to edit a wiki page. Within the scope of the Wikipedia site this was originally a "free for all", allowing completely anonymous editing. But wikis do not have to run on this model. Again, wiki "plugins" (and also standard features in some wikis) allow for a wiki site to be locked down to a single user, a number of users, or even to allow for a publishing workflow so that edits must be approved by a moderator before going live.
This level of "access control" that now exists in some wikis was not originally intended by Cunningham, who viewed the "open editing" concept as a profound shift (Cunningham, 2002) in the use of the web that encouraged democratic use. Humans however have a knack for destroying utopias, and some of the problems that have arisen with this completely open model are due to "one-upmanship" amongst users wishing to become "THE expert", immature or uninformed contributors, or just plain old "head cases" (Gorman, 2005, p. 225)
Why use a wiki for my site?
- If you are creating a largely static information based site, whether there is one "author" or many, wikis can be a suprisingly apt tool for the task.
- There are a proliferation of open source wiki softwares, running on practically every coding language that exists, some do not even require access to a database to work.
- Wiki markup is relatively simple to learn and its limitations will stop you making an ugly mess of your site.
The Further Reading page on this site lists resources where you can find links to lots of different wiki software, or you can read my review of MediaWiki.