User:Sj/Presentation

What makes a Wiki?

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia in many languages, written by its readers. Anybody can use the encyclopedia, add articles and edit existing articles.

Early wikis:

c2.com
Usemod and Meatball wikis

Today: m:Interwiki_map includes all manner of sites.

Wiki, word for fast

Wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for fast (wikiwiki), and refers to a page that is created by more than one user and/or to the software used to accomplish this. The most common type of wiki:

Works through a browser (install it once and it works for all users)
Allows any reader to edit (see a typo? go fix it!)
Prominently displays a brief list of all changes to the wiki
Allows editors to identify themselves by registering with the site.

So I can change anything I want?

Yes. Almost anything. You, the reader, are in control. Standard concerns with this kind of freedom revolve around visitors with ill intentions.

What if people remove one another's work?
What if mischievous readers come and deface the site?
Also: if everybody is editing each other's work... what about content ownership?

The same freedom makes it powerful and fast part. You can just go around and edit whatever you find interesting, if you make an error, someone, somewhere will spot it and correct it. If you find an error, just go ahead and correct it. And so on.

Track histories to avoid destruction or deletion
Make reversion to earlier content, and comparison of two edits, easy.
Active feedback : Watch changes as they take place. Recenchanges; RSS feeds.

Some early principles of active wikis:

Barn-raising, using real names, shared beliefs or goals. Actively building community.
Soft security, simple editing. Take the simplest thing that could possibly work, and make it fast.

What are wikis good for?

The fun of a dynamic main page

Wikis can be more than a way to look up or store information. A main page that is actively changed by many people, as with a blog, makes for good reading even for veteran users of the site. This isn't one of the real strengths of a wiki, however; they rarely make it as easy to keep a running commentary on a page as blogs do.

Working out subtleties

Wikis are excellent at letting a large group work out subtleties in essays or bodies of information. They allow for getting at the root of a disagreement -- right down to a fight over a very particular wording -- without beating around the bush.

Examples:

Protected political articles
Distinctions across cultures and languages
Allowing someone new to clarify a key point in 30 seconds

Going further

Logging in

You don't have to log in to read and edit a simple wiki. But logging in is useful for communities where you expect editors to come back more than a few times. People can even start to work collaborate, even though they may never be online at the same time.

Standard features of logging in:

Separate user page for personal information and personal comments
List of your latest edits
Custom Recentchanges for only pages you have touched
Extra tools, too dangerous or confusing for everyone : moving pages to new names, uploading images and files, deleting pages.
User preferences such as layout and skins.

Access control, hard security

This is the start of a slippery slope.

Simple wiki ---> Login required --> Special user classes --> 
Elaborate logins and built-in delays --> Totally controlled Content Management System

The further you move along the slope, the more control and reliability your content has, and the more time it takes to make each change.

Breakeven point : loss of intrinsic motivation
Make sure you need hard security you put in place.

Soft security

There is an alternative!

Case study: Wikipedia

Its brief history and growth

Wikipedia was started on January 15, 2001 by a few dozen collaborators. four and a half years later, there are 15000 active contributors, and almost 2,000,000 articles in 100 languages. Contributors are often drawn to the fact that they can change anything; a thrill of power usually turns into lasting enthusiasm.

Another look

Wikipedia : one of the world's most popular spam targets.

3,000,000+ pages (articles, talk, other); most with high Google rank.
1.5 billion page-views a month ; millions of distinct visitors.

Minimal hard security.

No hard anti-bot measures; 15 seconds to create an account and log in (demo)

This gives access to all tools. (Exceptions: meta-tools -- banning, protection, and deletion)
Extensive soft security.
URL checks, IP checks, proxy blocking. Manual options to set up temporary hard security (blocks, range blocks).

Vandal filters : curse words, controversial articles. All monitored by people.

Active cycles - People actively doing their work. Every page is part of some feedback loop; What links here, Orphaned articles, Categories

A quiet combination of whitelists, blacklists, greylists.

Words of thanks

Thanks to Ppareit, Jwales, Angela, Eloquence, GerardM, and all the others who have helped refine wiki presentations over the past two years.