Wikis

From HLWIKI Canada

Social media is able to create new, digital spaces for education

Are you interested in contributing to HLWIKI Canada - hlwiki.ca? contact: dean.giustini@ubc.ca

To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the wiki index.

Introduction

See Archives 2.0, Medical wikis // Top Fifty (50) Medical Wikis You Might (Want to) Know & Wikis as Reference

"A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm." - Henrik Ibsen

Wikis are used to enable online authoring and collaboration with groups of people which is a fundamental concept in Web 2.0. In academia, wikis enable groups of researchers or collaborators to create knowledge and develop, edit or add content. The social, open nature of wikis makes them revolutionary, controversial and sometimes problematic. While clearly useful for certain projects, wikis are not universally useful in health where standards of accuracy must attain the highest levels for human safety. Some libraries are using wikis to build knowledge repositories, manage Intranets and create content for pathfinders. Health librarians are using wikis to share information, expertise and success stories in information retrieval and evidence-based health care. Some critics suggest that wikis are not as reliable as traditional media such as books and encyclopedias and may even result in medical errors. There is considerable debate around these assertions. In 2005, Nature urged researchers to "read Wikipedia cautiously and amend it enthusiastically". In the same issue, one study found that science articles in Wikipedia contained only slightly more errors than the gold-standard Britannica Encyclopedia. Academic libraries of all kinds use wiki technologies. In July 2008, Google launched its own wiki called Knol which has already been compared to Wikipedia. Clearly, wikis seem to have moved past their early hype and have settled in as accepted tools for collaborative authoring and peer-to-peer networking.

History

The wiki concept goes back to the late 1980s. By the 1990s, wikis were being recognized as a means to develop private and public knowledge-bases, inspiring Nupedia founders to use wiki technology as a basis for public encyclopedia development. The word wiki means quick in Hawaiian. WikiWikiWeb, the brainchild of Ward Cunningham who created the Portland Pattern Repository, was the first to use the mnemonic - what I know is (also known as a backronym). By 2001, wikis were increasingly used as collaborative software for project communication, intranets and documentation for technical users. In December 2002, Socialtext launched the first commercial open source wiki solution. Open source wiki software was widely available, downloaded and installed throughout these years. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets. There is a greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public internet.

Content creation

A wiki is an editable website that records changes so that pages can be changed back if needed. The underlying system includes tools to monitor changes and pages to discuss and resolve disagreements over content. Wiki content can be misleading when users add incorrect information, intentionally or accidentally. Many wikis allow unrestricted access or require registration. Some private wikis, in addition, require an authentication process. Implementing a wiki is a challenge, particularly in convincing people to use it. Training is required to make people comfortable when using the technology, otherwise they won't bother; collaborators or teams should be given incentives of some kind to contribute. In some cases, collaboration may be at odds with the organizational culture of the collaborators, and wiki implementation may be viewed as disruptive. Making a change as a corporate culture from being competitive to being cooperative is a large undertaking; it requires a change in perspective at all levels of the organization as well as administrative levels.

Formatting

The wiki source format is augmented with a simplified markup language. Style and syntax can vary a great deal among implementations, some of which also allow HTML tags. Making HTML code visible makes the actual text content very hard to read and edit. It is therefore better to promote plain-text editing with a few simple conventions for structure and style. Wikis are a true hypertext medium, with non-linear navigational structures. Each page contains a large number of links to other pages. Most wikis offer at least a title search, and sometimes a full-text search. The scalability of the search depends on whether the wiki engine uses a database; indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. On Wikipedia, which is the best known wiki-based encyclopedia, the "Go button" allows readers to view pages that matche the entered search criteria as closely as possible. The MetaWiki search engine was created to enable searches across multiple wikis, but the search is keyword only. The most common wiki systems are server-based. The edit, display and control functions are provided on a server through a wikiengine that renders content into HTML-based pages for display.

Controlling content

Wikis are designed to make easy corrections. While wikis are open, they provide a means to verify recent additions to pages. On every wiki, there is a "Recent Changes" page, which is a specific list of recent edits or a list of edits made over a given time. Some wikis filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts. From the change log, other functions are accessible such as Revision History showing the previous versions; the diff feature, highlighting the changes between two revisions. Using the revision history, editors can view and restore previous versions. A regular wiki user can view "Recent Changes" and consult the history, restoring a previous revision. This process is more or less easy to do, depending on the wiki software used. The open philosophy of most wikis does not ensure that contributors have good intentions. Vandalism is a problem, and the idea of undoing damage rather than preventing it is seen as soft security.

Content management systems

Wikis share several features with content management systems (CMS) which are used by various learning organizations and communities-of-practice. In comparing wikis and CMSs, the following basic features should be considered:

The name of an article is embedded in the hyperlink;
Articles can be created or edited at anytime by anyone (with certain limitations for protected articles);
Articles are editable within any web browser;
Each article provides one-click access to the history/versions page;
Each article provides one-click access to a discussion page particular to that article;
The most recent additions/modifications of articles can be monitored actively or passively.

The concept of a wiki refers to a core set of features and fits a generative nature (as Jonathan Zittrain has labeled it). Whether wikis encourage more writing or leads to raising the awareness of community members remains to be seen.