Wikis

Wikis are basically collaboratively written online documents. They make it easy for groups to write, edit, link, or delete pages in a way that enables collaborative working as never before. The word isn’t an acronym as many people assume but comes from the Hawaiian phrase “wiki wiki” which means quickly. A number of features are common to most wiki tools. The history of each page’s changes is tracked and can be seen by all users. Differences between versions are represented graphically and it is easy to revert to previous versions of each page.

The power of wiki technology is most clearly seen in Wikipedia where users have created and sustained millions of pages (that is just in English – Wikipedia also has versions in more than a hundred languages) to create an encyclopaedia to rival the Encyclopaedia Britannica in depth and accuracy. We used wikis in the BBC to produce all sorts of official and semi-official documentation from policies to guidelines and even including some scripts.