THDL Toolbox > THL Technologies & Open Standards > Technologies For Dummies > Wikis
What is a Wiki?
Simple Introduction to Wikis
A Wiki is a Website, and the underlying software making it possible, that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content while online, as well as easily linking the resultant pages to each other in multiple ways. Its ease of use online has made it an important tool in exploring the distributed production of content where scores or thousands of people can work collaboratively together at producing knowledge of various types. The 
Wikipedia Encyclopedia is just the most famous example of the use of Wiki technology. Its great success at rapidly generating large amounts of high quality content through reliance upon the general public rather than a small group of professionals has inspired many others to explore the possibilities of the participatory creation of knowledge which relies upon broadly defined communities of uses. However, Wikis are often used as well in an authenticated environment - meaning only users with passwords can use - amongst smaller, controlled groups as a tool for collaborative authoring of documents. Another important element of Wikis is that they allow easy access to the history of the document's various versions, so that at any given point users can see what the document looked like in an earlier version. In addition, they can choose to revert to the earlier form of the document and undo subsequent changes.
How are Wikis being used in THDL?
THDL uses Wikis extensively for multiple purposes through the medium of the Sakai worksites. We use Wiki technology for our documentation which provides manuals and guidelines for how to use tools and systems within THDL, generate content of various types, and other sorts of information. This is then published as our Toolbox, where such things as our entire process of working with audio-video from recording in the field to final delivery over the Web is provided in great detail. A Wiki is ideal for documentation because of the way in which documentation requires constant updating as well as the participation of many different individuals. We also use the Wiki extensively for planning documents amongst our collaborators, as well as for generating content collaboratively which may eventually be published as a Wiki or, once completed, put published through some other form, such as XML.
How Can I Explore Wikis Further?
- See the Wikipedia article on Wiki for a short introduction.
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