Wiki
From Fan History Wiki
Wiki is a piece of collaborative software which allows people to create group projects, editing it and organizing it in a communal fashion.
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[edit] Historical Definitions
The following definition dates to June 2002 and is not from fandom:
- 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. [1]
The following definition dates to November 2007 and is not from fandom:
- Based on a Hawaiian term meaning "quick" or "informal." A Web application that allows users to add content to a collaborative hypertext Web resource (coauthoring), as in an Internet forum, and permits others to edit that content (open editing). Authorizations and passwords are not required, and content can be changed by anyone simply by clicking on a "edit" link located on the page. A wiki may have policies to govern editing and procedures for handling edit wars. Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any visitor to the site. The first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository established by Ward Cunningham in March 1995. The term also refers to the collaborative server software used to collectively create such a Web site, allowing Web pages (stored in a database) to be easily created and updated. A prime example is Wikipedia. Use of wiki software to facilitate delivery of information services in an academic library is the subject of the article "Something Wiki Comes This Way" by Roy Withers in the December 2005 issue of C&RLNews. [2]
[edit] History
The first wiki was written in Perl by Ward Cunningham in 1994, and was launched that year as WikiWikiWeb (the name of both the wiki site and its wiki engine); it is still active as of 2008. The largest and most active wiki is Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as a successor to their earlier encyclopedia project, Nupedia (started in 2000, now inactive and archived since 2003).
Many wiki server software services have been written in a number of languages. Wikipedia, and the Fan Hinstory Wiki, runs on a wiki engine called MediaWiki; it is one of the most extensively-developed wiki engines available, and has been customized for use behind corporate and government firewalls, particularly for use by employees in both settings.
