Between the Bytes

Gettin’ wiki with it

Val Souza

Does the open-source paradigm apply only to software? If there can be collaboration amongst thousands of people on the writing of program code for things as complex as a computer operating system, why can’t this model be used for other products as well?

It sure can. In fact, whenever any kind of manufacturing in the traditional sense is not required, and the ‘product’ is largely information-based and modular, the open-source model can work very well indeed. For proof of the potential one need look no further than wikis—special websites that can be compiled easily and then edited or extended at will by a group of people (that could potentially include just about anyone, since no programming knowledge whatsoever is required).

The most famous wiki of them all is the Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). This free online encyclopaedia has been created by the collaborative efforts of some 30,000 voluntary contributors who’ve put together over a million articles in 50 languages since the site was started in January 2001. Anyone—and that means anyone—can edit articles, simply by clicking on an ‘edit this page’ link.

In fact, the simple, free-for-all editing of the content is the defining characteristic of a wiki. The creator of the concept, Ward Cunningham, hit upon this quick way to create and share ideas—he named it ‘wiki’ after the speedy ‘Wiki-Wiki’ shuttle buses at Honolulu airport (wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick).

If you’re dabbling with the Wikipedia for the first time, it comes as quite a shock that you have the power to edit any of the existing content, deleting or modifying what others have written and adding in your own two-bit wisdom. The live site is instantaneously updated with the new version of the page you’ve just created. If you thought Usenet, mailing lists and blogs enabled free expression at its most liberating, wikis take you up onto a different plane altogether.

Without any kind of formal control, one would expect a chaotic mess of incoherent content, hardly of use to anyone at all. The reality of a thriving wiki is in fact quite the opposite. In the Wikipedia, for instance, while anyone can edit anything, every version of a page gets almost instantly reviewed by other users, who may decide to restore a previous version (every single older version of every single page is stored online) or make further changes to the page. The apparently naïve Wikipedian logic that “the world is full of reasonable people who can collectively arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers,” actually seems to work quite well. Contributors are urged to exercise a neutral point of view (NPOV); in any case, heavily opinionated or biased statements are quickly modified or deleted, or banished to a separate “talk” page for further discussion.

Wikipedia has a lot going for it, not the least of which is its currency—there’s no other encyclopaedia on Earth that can even remotely claim to be updated several hundred times a day. But it’s definitely far from perfect, and the authenticity and accuracy of some of the content could well be questioned. Indeed, Wikipedia has detractors too, as I discovered when I received anonymous mail condemning me for “pushing” Wikipedia in my previous column. The mail cautioned me that Wikipedia content was slanted to reflect the biases of its owners and a handful of moderators. I obviously don’t agree.

Debate on the efficacy of Wikipedia notwithstanding, no one’s questioning the utilitarian simplicity of the concept of a wiki for knowledge-sharing and collaboration amongst teams of workers in diverse fields. Wikis are already being used in organisations to brainstorm new ideas, manage geographically dispersed projects and teams, facilitate events, track progress on outsourced projects, and initiate new employees into the organisation’s culture. A large number of publicly accessible wikis are not surprisingly oriented towards techies, but there are also general-interest wikis. Because public wikis have become the unfortunate target of spammers, you won’t find many of them listed on search engines, as the wiki owners have been forced to opt out of being indexed by search engine bots. (Send me an e-mail if you’d like a link to all publicly accessible wikis).

You can dabble with public wikis at will, but setting up your own would require a Wiki tool. For a completely controllable, closed group wiki in your organisation, Socialtext is one of the options from which to procure the wiki software for a fee. Cheaper alternatives for hosted services are available at EditMe and TeamFlux. For individual experimentation it’s probably better to get started for free with services available at Swiki.net, Open Wiki and Seed Wiki. If you consider all this too wishy-washy, and your geekometer readings have been consistently high, dive in at the deep end and install the open-source TWiki (www.twiki.org).

A century ago Lord Acton observed that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” On the Internet, wikis put the power back into the hands of ordinary users. Contrary to the cliché, I’ve come to the conclusion that the wiki empowerment actually tends to increase one’s feelings of social responsibility and commitment, rather than diminishing them.

So why don’t you go get wiki with it and then tell me what you think.

Val Souza, Consulting Editor

valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com