The Wikimania

From Wikipedia to Wikispaces the wiki concept is invading the whole word.

Thousand of peoples each one independent from another writing and collaborating to build content, create open source and free software or develop spaces for collaborative work.

The wikimania is here! and we are all part of it.

In our eLDI course we also use wiki concept for the collaborative work. From all over the world (Bolivia to Philippines) people are editing and sharing content.

Are there some cons on this practice? Maybe! Some people think that free editors can write anything even contradictory or not true concepts in a wikipedia and that there is a serious danger on this practice of freelance writers working for no money and without any control or supervisor.

To avoid this, there are several workarounds: To make a public not controlled edition for anyone to edit and one more restricted (let´s say through some calification or authentication process) access for a more "trusted" wikipedia edition or content.

The fact is that wipikedia and the wiki mania is growing as fast as internet and maybe most of us soon than later, will be involved in a wiki project by ourselves.

To wiki or not to wiki?

For people with straightforward views on learning, wiki is just another vague storage of wild ideas. Taking vague storage seriously will give you endless ideas. Wikipedia is free goodbye ???? encyclopedia and gone is the book business.

Let me quote an article from wikipedia website the history of it: The idea of wiki can be traced back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, wikis were increasingly recognized as a promising way to develop private-and public-knowledge bases, and this potential inspired the founders of the Nupedia encyclopedia project, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, to use wiki technology as a basis for an electronic encyclopedia: Wikipedia was launched in January 2001; it originally was based upon UseMod software, but later switched to its own, open source codebase, now adopted by many other wikis.

In the early 200s, wikis were increasingly adopted in the enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets and documentation, initially for technical users. In December 2002, Socialtext launched the first commercial open source wiki solution. Open source siki software was widely available, downloaded and installed throughout these years. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets. There is arguably greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public internet.

The content management of Wiki

For people looking for content management systems with an enterprise wiki must consider basic features such as:

1. The name of the article is embedded in the hyperlink,

2. Articles can be created or edited at anytime by anyone (with certain limitations for protected articles),

3. Articles are editable through web browser,

4. Each article provides one-click access to the history/versioning page, which also supports version differencing (“diff) and retrieving prior versions,

5. Each article provides one-click access to a discussion page particular to that article, and

6. The most recent additions/modifications of articles can be monitored actively or passively.

Flordeliza O. Naje, Christina Mayorga and Rolando Abando