Traditionally, wikis offer free navigation between their pages via hypertext links in page text, rather than requiring users to follow a formal or structured navigation scheme. 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. Some wikis present users with an edit button or link on the page being viewed. Wikipedia is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, with each one pertaining to a specific language, making it the largest reference work of all time.
The range of quality classes begins with “Stub” (very short pages), followed by “Start”, “C” and “B” (in increasing order of quality). The study identified the most disputed entries on the English Wikipedia as George W. Bush, anarchism, Muhammad, list of WWE personnel, global warming, circumcision, United States, Jesus, race and intelligence, and Christianity. In contrast, articles on other languages’ Wikipedias often focus on regional issues.
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. Some wikis operate a structure of neighbors and delegates, where 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. A WikiNode is a page on a wiki which describes and links to other, related wikis.
- The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down.
- 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.
- This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.
- Wikipedia is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, with each one pertaining to a specific language, making it the largest reference work of all time.
- The syntax and features of wiki markup languages for denoting style and structure can vary greatly among implementations.
- Users may also create indexes or table of contents pages, hierarchical categorization via a taxonomy, or other forms of ad hoc content organization.
Navigation between wikis
A notable discussion within the English Wikipedia community concerns the preference for national variety of the English language, particularly American English and British English. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.
History
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. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. 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. This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.
Internal news publications
WikiNode networks act as webrings which may be navigated from one node to another to find a wiki which addresses a specific subject. Adding categories or tags to a page makes it easier for other users to find it. 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. Users may also create indexes or table of contents pages, hierarchical categorization via a taxonomy, or other forms of ad hoc content organization.
The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page content, while others use a relational database, as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching. HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of Vannevar Bush, the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to “comment on and change one another’s text”.
Wikipedia’s sister projects
- Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified by a wiki’s community of users.
- Version 2 of the GNU Free Documentation License includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing, and Creative Commons licenses are also popular.
- Various suggestions have been made, ranging from standardizing a single form of English to creating separate versions of the English Wikipedia project.
- Some hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis requiring authentication to access.
- Some wikis also implement patrolled revisions, in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate.
- To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained free links (called wikilinks), wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it.
The version history feature allows harmful changes to be reverted quickly and easily. Most wikis offer a recent changes page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame. Some hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis requiring authentication to access. The software which powers a wiki may be implemented as a series of scripts which operate an existing web server, a standalone application server that runs on one or more web servers, or in the case of personal wikis, run as a standalone application on a single computer.
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. Wiki implementations retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert peer reviewers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they have analyzed. For example, in 2006 a German Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm 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 provide additional content control, allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of pages to maintain quality. 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). 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.
Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the royaldogs casino monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. These groups may focus on a specific topic area (for example, women’s history), a specific location or a specific kind of task (for example, checking newly created pages). Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Version 2 of the GNU Free Documentation License includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing, and Creative Commons licenses are also popular.