What is wiki? Good question, that is exactly what I was wondering the other day when I was reading all of these emails flying by me about wiki.

Wiki is a hawaiian term for quick, and wiki wiki is really quick. According to Bo Leuf and WardCunningham authors of "The Wiki Way", "Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly." Leuf's and Cunningham's web site, http://wiki.org says, "Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users."

Ok but how does this fit into libraries?

Dave Mattison, Access Services Archivist for British Columbia Archives, Cananda wrote a great article in Information Technology Today entitled "Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool." In the article he further explains what wiki is and its possible uses. He also notes that the Canadian National Site Licensing Project and National Science Digital Library [ http://eval.comm.nsdlib.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WhatIsThis,http://annotations.comm.nsdlib.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl, and http://sourceforge.comm.nsdlib.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiResources ] use wiki.

It is a great article and if you ever wanted to know about wiki, it is a good resource, especially because it provides examples of wiki use on the web.

But doesn't it terrify you a little to know that anybody can go in and change whatever you slaved away at? It may not be the best idea for every application. However, it is being used among groups to share and write documents together and share information amongst each other.

What is stopping some guy from trashing your wiki site? Well nothing really, but others on the wiki site (because they too have total design control and access) can fix it or redesign it better. It is truely a group collaborative site.

Finally, there is a good commentary by David Weinberger on NPR on wikis from July 21, 2003. As he says, wikis are a "social software" that allows all to create, develop, change, alter a web site. Wikipedia.org is a perfect example of wiki of at work.