What is a wiki? What is a wiki?

Wiki, Chinese translation has wiki, wiki, Wai Ji, Fast ji, etc., originates from the Hawaiian language "Wee kee Wee kee", this is "quick quick point" meaning. Here, wikis refer to a hypertext system that supports collaborative, community-oriented writing and includes a set of assistive tools that support this writing. Some people think that the wiki system is a human knowledge of the network system, we can browse, create, change wiki text on the Web, and this creation, change, and publishing costs far less than the HTML text, while the wiki system also supports the community-oriented collaborative writing, Provide necessary help for collaborative writing; Finally, wiki writers naturally form a community, and the wiki system provides a simple communication tool for the community. Wikis are easy and open to use compared to other hypertext systems, so a wiki system can help us share knowledge of a domain within a community.

The meaning of the ideal knowledge base is self-evident, it is the main way of human inheritance civilization. The traditional Knowledge Base is established by organizing a group of experts with this knowledge to compile it within a specific period of time and to update the version regularly. The typical representatives are encyclopedias, dictionaries and various textbooks.

Wikis believe that the traditional way to create a knowledge base, high cost, slow to update, the so-called authority may not be authoritative, wikis use the internet will be "a group of experts" to expand to each netizen, the intermittent version of the update, become constantly updated. Wikis believe that knowledge is hidden in the private sector, believing that "more eyes will find more mistakes" and believe that "giving individual freedom, one must be able to use this freedom".

The first difficulty in achieving the wiki ideal is how to motivate the vast majority of netizens to devote their knowledge freely. Wikis are open, equal, free, and instantaneous to return the participation of a wide range of netizens, and any record in a wiki can be modified at any time. This design minimizes the cost of users participating in the compilation of knowledge base, but it raises the second challenge of wikis, namely, who controls quality? Who's going to manage it? Like faith in democracy, wikis believe that wiki people who are involved in compiling the knowledge base are fully able to manage the quality and process of wikis under the common rules of "procedure", "policy" and "Action Guide".

Another tool in the wiki's hand is time. It can use the accumulation of time to make up for the lack of part-time participation can not complete the task as planned. A wiki Knowledge base plan once online, as long as the server non-stop, it can be 7x24 without wasting a minute and a second to accumulate, and the more backward, the faster.

Another important reason for the rapid acceptance of wikis is that as the knowledge update accelerates, there is a growing need to use faster means to create, accumulate, and share information.

Created in 1995, Wardcunningham completes the first wiki program WikiWikiWeb in Perl and shares it for free through OSS (open source software open-source). After that, more programmers have developed more open source Wiki systems, in which Magnus manske wikipedia in PHP, which has become the most popular wiki system in the world because of the great success of Wikipedia, which runs on it. This system is also, of course, open source software that does not pay.

After http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/downloads the Wikipedia software, you can create a wiki knowledge community. As with all Internet projects, the first step is of course to create a home page. The content of the Wiki home page is mainly composed of the classification directory of this Knowledge base.

Because wikis replace HTML with complex formatting tags with simple formatting tags, no artist is required to create a standard wiki home page with simple learning. For the first time you create a wiki, the easiest way to do this is to copy the other wiki's homepage, keep it in its form, and replace it with your own content.

Since the creator of the wiki's home page is not sure that the directory pages that you created are the most reasonable, scientific, and comprehensive, he must give all the people who can see this page the right to modify the wiki's homepage. Of course, all the modified, superseded home pages will be saved in the history to correct inappropriate modifications.

Thus, the question of who will decide the "good or bad" problem is deduced. Wikis always believe that "in the process of this modification, it may be inappropriate, but it will eventually be corrected." "Everyone will eventually revise a document better, not worse." "Because" the meaning of people producing documents is that they can be useful to everyone, and should encourage anyone to freely modify and organize any information in the document to be more useful to themselves or others, so anything that is outdated or no longer cared for will be removed from the wiki, Not to mention the obvious mistakes or unpleasant things. "The wiki system, of course, also has the means to deal with malicious changes, such as IP, so that he can no longer come to this wiki."

The next thing to do is to compile from the category down one level. This is a work of great workload, because it is a large and not a small number of people in a short time to complete the task, so it is necessary to use the wiki "creative" approach. The English version of Wikipedia, which began on January 15, 2001, has accumulated more than 300,000 entries over 3 years and is three times times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. At this pace, Wikipedia's income will reach 1 million in the next few months, with as many as 50 words, from Arabic to Gaelic. In June 2004, the Wikipedia site clicked on an average of 8.7 million per day, surpassing the Encyclopedia Britannica website.