18.188 wiki, wiki

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 188.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: "Fotis Jannidis" <jannidis_at_linglit.tu- (23)
                 darmstadt.de>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

   [2] From: Philipp Reichmuth <reichmuth_at_web.de> (3)
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

   [3] From: Patrick Durusau <Patrick.Durusau_at_sbl-site.org> (34)
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

   [4] From: "Daniel O'Donnell" <daniel.odonnell_at_uleth.ca> (36)
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

   [5] From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk_at_umd.edu> (19)
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

   [6] From: Clare Callaghan <cm_2_at_mac.com> (16)
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

   [7] From: "Lisa L. Spangenberg" (19)
                 <lisaspangenberg_at_earthlink.net>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:25:46 +0100
         From: "Fotis Jannidis" <jannidis_at_linglit.tu-darmstadt.de>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

> Dear Collegues,
>
> Over the last several weeks the term "wiki" has come up in several
> threads. I'm not familiar with it. Can someone provide a concise
> definition and, perhaps. several examples, in our field?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Charles Faulhaber

>From Wikipedia:

"Wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weeky") is a website (or other hypertext
document collection) that allows any user to add content, as on an
Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by others.

The term can also refer to the collaborative software used to create such
a website.

Wiki (with a capital 'W') and WikiWikiWeb are sometimes used to refer to
the Portland Pattern Repository, the first ever wiki. Proponents of this
usage suggest using a lower-case 'w' to distinguish the generic terms
discussed here. Wiki wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick" or
"super-fast"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

Hope this helps,

Fotis Jannidis

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:26:19 +0100
         From: Philipp Reichmuth <reichmuth_at_web.de>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

A Google search for "wiki" will reveal Wikipedia as well as a concise
definition on the first page of results, as well as a large number of examples.

Philipp

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:26:57 +0100
         From: Patrick Durusau <Patrick.Durusau_at_sbl-site.org>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?

Charles,

From: What Is Wiki (http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki)

>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.
>Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows
>the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the
>content itself.
>Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle
>effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any
>page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of
>the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

For further information, start at: http://wiki.org/

Not sure what you mean by 'our field' but some good examples:

Teaching Wiki, http://teachingwiki.org/
(Joe Moxley, Professor of English at the University of South Florida)

LinuxQuestions.org
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Main_Page

and, of course:

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Quality varies a lot, just like in traditional publishing, so readers need
to evaluate what they read, on wikis and elsewhere.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau_at_sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:27:27 +0100
         From: "Daniel O'Donnell" <daniel.odonnell_at_uleth.ca>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?
Here's a link to the page defining "wiki" in the wikipedia--so it is both a
definition and an example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki>
Wiki's are on-line collaborative web sites, usually reference works, whose
entries are written, edited, and maintained by the community of users. In
the case of the Wikipedia, this means everybody who comes across it on the
Internet. In others it can be smaller more focused groups. We will have one
on the Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
when we get our website up this weekend (I hope). We'll be using it for a
FAQ, to define acronyms and jargon (there's already an entry for wiki), and
develop consensus on how to do things (e.g. somebody might write an entry
on "metrical markup" and propose a way of encoding Old English prosody in
TEI; as this was refined by others, it would become a defacto standard).
The main problems with Wikis are vandalism (crazy and/or malicious people
writing silly things or, as has recently begun on wikipedia, introducing
deliberate minor errors into dates, etc. in already-existing entries) and
incompetence (i.e. people who aren't really experts writing incorrect
entries as if they were). This is probably a bigger problem on general
purpose Wikis like the wikipedia than smaller ones such as ours (at least I
hope it is). There are four ways of defending against this: banning
offender's IP addresses (not always successful), restricting membership to
a small group (some wiki-ers are ideologically opposed to this), requiring
participants to sign and/or justify their contributions, using the "trace"
feature found in most if not all wikis to undo the damage and restore the
entry to its last good state. As you can imagine, this last option
sometimes leads to wars on general interest wikis. You can imagine the
fights one might have over entries on abortion or jesus, for example.
-dan
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Tel. (403) 329-2377
Fax. (403) 382-7191
E-mail <daniel.odonnell_at_uleth.ca>
Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/>
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:27:55 +0100
         From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk_at_umd.edu>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?
This might be a good time to mention WriteHere.net, a wiki-based
collaborative writing project one of my students, Matt Bowen, is currently
developing:
<http://www.writehere.net/>http://www.writehere.net/
"<http://www.writehere.net/moin.cgi/WriteHere>WriteHere.net is a place
where you can post a story, some poems, a title, a character, or anything
else creative, and the community can help you edit and develop it.
<http://www.writehere.net/moin.cgi/WriteHere>WriteHere.net wants to give
your fiction a home. We want to give others a chance to help you write, and
you a chance to help others write. We want to provide a friendly community
to those who only want to read, to those who want to work on their proofing
skills, to those who translate, and to literary experimenters. You don't
have to contribute an original work to contribute -- we need close readers,
editors, proofer, instigators, and developers as much as we need authors."
Please point your own students toward this site to help it grow, or
contribute yourself! Matt
--
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
<http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/>http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/
--[6]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:29:23 +0100
         From: Clare Callaghan <cm_2_at_mac.com>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?
A "wiki" is a very collaborative, freely-available database on a topic. For
example, there is an 18th c. wiki, and wikipedia is becoming the free,
online encyclopedia. Contributors post entries, and then subsequent
contributors supplement/correct/revise the entries, sometimes to the point
of entirely rewriting the entry. Anyone can contribute or revise an entry.
See (and explore) www.wikipedia.com for details. Technically, wikis are
really interesting. Instead of using HTML tags, person only needs to use
[[]] (double square brackets) around the word/phrase that should become a
link. Then the wiki software goes through all those [[]] words and
generates the paths to those pages for those words, or marks the words
differently if no entries yet exist for it.
          Yours,
          Clare Callaghan
          Managing Editor, Maryland Online Encyclopedia
          Lecturer, University of Maryland, College Park
          ~and a very long time list-lurker~
--[7]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:28:24 +0100
         From: "Lisa L. Spangenberg" <lisaspangenberg_at_earthlink.net>
         Subject: Re: 18.185 wiki?
Wiki, from the Hawaiian wikiwiki or "quick" is, in general terms, a
web-based writing and editing system. Typically, wikis allow readers to
edit the text, so that wikis lend themselves to community projects and
collaborative writing. Usually links are automatically generated by the
wiki system, based on either using intercaps in words, called "camel case,"
or by using simple tags to indicate a link.  Wikis tend to have their own
much simplified versions of HTML markup, and they are very much template
driven, freeing writers from some of the requirements of other kinds of web
page creation.
Here's a good explanations of a wiki:
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp
Here's a good example of a wiki project
http://www.wikipedia.org
You might try looking up "wiki" in the Wikipedia, a public, free,
opensource wiki based encyclopedia:
--
Lisa L. Spangen
Instructional Technology  | http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/it/
My opinions are my own.  | Who else would want them?