World-wide wikis

Today’s CBC Web column…

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Once upon a time, a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham visited Honolulu, where a Honolulu International Airport counter employee told him to take the a particular shuttle bus line between terminals, nicknamed the “WikiWiki” line: wiki is a Hawaiian-language word for “fast.”

I don’t know whether Cunningham took the WikiWiki bus or not, but in 1994 he began developing something called WikiWikiWeb, and in 2007 the word wiki entered the Oxford English Dictionary Online. Presumably it still means “fast” in Hawaiian, but for Internet users, it now has a new meaning: a collaborative website that can be directly edited by anyone with access to it.

The WikiWikiWeb was, and is, focused on enabling programmers to exchange ideas. If you’re not a programmer, you’ll find it largely unintelligible (I did). But it turned out to be more important as a proof of concept than anything else: once people grasped the concept of a wiki, wikis starting springing up all over.

Today, wikis are used by corporations for project communication, intranets and documentation. In fact, there are probably more wikis used internally by companies than you can find on the Internet. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots to find on the Internet.

The most famous, and the one almost everyone has encountered, is Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia,” one of the top 100 web sites in the world. It has more than a million articles (in fact, it’s approaching two million).

Here’s how it (and other wikis) work: someone posts an article. Anyone who comes along and reads that article thereafter can edit it. And that’s it.

It’s a very simple idea. It has also had some problems, as you’d expect. After all, there’s no guarantee that the person posting the original article knows what he or she is talking about. There’s nothing stopping someone from vandalizing an existing page, or adding links to spam or porn sites, or…

Except there is. What makes wikis work is the community of users they create. Errors, profanity, pornography and other forms of online vandalism are spotted by all the other Wikipedia users and contributors and quickly (or, at least, eventually) corrected. Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

Most people that visit Wikipedia are just readers. Some are writers, adding new sections to existing articles or creating new articles. Many act as editors, correcting errors or making small additions. And a few hundred have been rewarded for long-time contributions to Wikipedia by being made administrators, who can delete and undelete pages, block and unblock certain users, etc., or even temporarily freeze a page to put a stop to “edit wars,” when contributors with strongly conflicting views battle to get their own version of the truth into a particular article.

Want to contribute to Wikipedia? Go ahead. Find a topic you know something about and change something you disagree with, or write a brand-new topic. Then watch how the Wikipedians change it. It’ll give you an appreciation for the whole concept of wikis.

It may not make you trust them anymore, though, and in fact Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source of information for, say, term papers or (in my own experience) books for educational publishers. Fortunately, a proper Wikipedia article cites its sources, so even if you don’t trust the article itself, you can easily use it as a springboard to find more information that you might find more trustworthy.

Or, you could try Citizendium instead. It’s a new wiki created by Larry Sangser, who was involved in the creation of Wikipedia with its founder, Jimmy Swales. (There’s a lot of controversy over whether Sangser is a co-founder of Wikipedia or not. He says he is, Swales says he isn’t.) The differences? Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium emphasizes the involvement of experts. Anyone can develop and revise articles, but all articles have to be approved by experts familiar with the subject matter. Once they’re approved, they’re no longer directly editable. (Contributors can work on improving a draft version that browsers don’t see by default.) Another big difference is that almost all authors and participants have to use their real names: Wikipedia allows pseudonyms.

Citizendium has only been up and running for a few months, but Sangser is cautiously optimistic it will take off. At the moment, of course, it has far, far fewer articles than Wikipedia.

Or, for a completely different take, you might want to visit Conservapedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia written from a socially, economically and Christian conservative viewpoint, because its founder, Andrew Schafly, felt Wikipedia has a liberal, anti-Christian and anti-American bias. (Conservapedia’s front page features a daily Bible verse, for example.)

But there are many, many other uses for wikis out there than online encyclopedias. Here are a few I found:

The International Music Score Library Project. This is a wiki aimed at building a virtual library of public domain music scores. It was launched in February, 2006, and currently boasts more than 5,100 works by more than 500 composers, mostly scans of old musical editions no longer covered by copyright, although it also allows contemporary composers to upload their scores. Pretty much the complete works of Bach are online, and almost all of Chopin’s, as well.

The Memory Archive. This is a wiki-based encyclopedia of memories: anyone is welcome to tell a story about something they remember. The editors will correctly format it and index it, then lock it in place–other people can’t come in an edit your memories. When I visited it today, links on the home page led to memorie about Frank Sinatra, The Vietnam War, the 9/11 attacks, cell phones, chia pets, disco, Hurricane Katrina, Napoleon Dynamite, early PCs, the Hungarian Revolution, John Glenn, and Guns n’ Roses, among many others.

WikiTravel. This wiki allows people to post guides and other articles to places from around the world. As of this morning, it had 15,731 destination guides and other articles. Its destination of the month is Swansea, and its “off the beaten path” featured destination is Sado Island, off the west cost of Japan. There’s also travel news and interesting facts (“Part of the cuisine of Huarez, Peru, and vicinity is cuy, better known in English as guinea pig.”)

Memory Alpha and Wookiepedia. The former is a wiki dedicated to everything related to Star Trek, the latter is a wiki dedicated to everything related to Star Wars. They’re both very popular, as you can imagine. From the former I discovered today that William Shatner is set to host a new talk show for A&E Television, from the latter I learned that the Ewoks of Endor juiced dangleberries annually. Who knew?

Can wikis be used for other things than collecting information? Well…maybe. Penguin Books decided to give it a try with its One Million Penguins project, a novel written wiki-style. I delved into the result a little bit today, and would have to say that its primary feature is incoherence, which probably isn’t surprising: for a while, the project was drawing more than 100 edits an hour, which forced Penguin to impose “reading windows,” freezing content for a few hours every day so that the more serious participants could read over what had been changed.

The project’s title was of course a reference to the idea that a million monkeys with typewriters would eventually churn out the collected works of William Shakespeare at random. Based on One Million Penguins, I’d say their chances of success are at least as good as the chances of a wide-open wiki producing a useable novel.

Of course, I would have said the same thing about an encyclopedia.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2007/07/world-wide-wikis/

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