Wiki+Basics

=Wiki basics — what and why? =

Definitions
**Basically, a wiki is a collection of interlinked Web pages that can be quickly and easily edited by its readers, using no more than a standard Web browser. ** The first wikis were created so that a community of people could collaborate to build up a shared knowledge-base of interlinked articles. ¶ The best-known wiki is the collaboratively-authored online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, which has thousands of contributors, but there are millions of others wikis, some big, some small. Some are publicly available and readable by anyone with Internet access, but others are implemented as closed systems, for corporate knowledge management. ¶ A wiki is somewhat like a blog, in that you can regard it in part as a social phenomenon (collaborative authoring) and in part as a technical system (a kind of software). We will use the term **wiki system** when we want to make clear that it is the latter we are talking about; where we use the term **wiki** alone we are talking specifically about sites that use this software to enable collectively authored content.

The one-woman-wiki?
Here’s why we make the distinction between wikis as social phenomena, and wiki systems as software — because although wiki systems were devised for //collaborative// authoring of knowledge resources, it's not impossible for a single person to use a wiki system to create a Web site. Some people simply find that they can make their own personal Web site more easily using a wiki system than by any of the traditional means (we’ll see why in a minute). There are some people who will react to this by saying, in effect, ‘It’s only a wiki if the authoring is done by a group of people!’ and a remark like this was indeed made at the Brunel KIDMM workshop.

What is a wiki system?
**A wiki system is a software system that makes it possible to create, update, maintain and manage a wiki.** ¶ Early Web sites were essentially a collection of separate text files marked up in HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language. Each Web page was a single such file. The HTML code tells the user’s Web browser how to ‘typeset’ and display the contents, and it also pulls in photos and other images to make up the page which the user sees on screen. ¶ Wiki sites are different. They are an example of what we call ‘dynamic’ Web content. The parts that make up a wiki page are stored as separate fragments. Some wiki systems store these fragments inside fields in a database system, others just store them as text files in folders. When you go to view a wiki page, the fragments are assembled ‘dynamically’ (in an instant, on demand) into a complete Web page and sent as such to your browser. ¶ To achieve this, every wiki system has to have some programming behind it. The programming is usually in a scripting language such as PHP, Perl or Python. And there is a big choice of different wiki systems — well over a hundred.

Where does a wiki system have its home?
¶ **DIY installation.** Alternatively, if you have your own Web server, or you are hiring server space from an Internet service provider, you could install wiki software of your choice on that server, and configure it however you want. Some of these wiki systems are commercial software and you have to pay for them. But there are some highly sophisticated systems you can download and install for free, including MediaWiki which is the system that runs Wikipedia. (Later we will add to this wiki a page describing some free, open-source wiki systems.) ¶ Essentially, the choice is about whether you want something fairly simple to get started with, where the maintenance is done by someone else, or whether you are prepared to do the work or pay for the help to get a more powerful, more flexible or more secure system to meet your needs.
 * Hosted wikis** live on the servers of a company which provides wiki hosting as its business. Sometimes these are called ‘wiki farms’. This KIDMM wiki is a hosted one, and the wiki facility (software and storage) is provided by [|Wikispaces], a company in San Francisco which provides a home for over a million wikis. Usually these companies let you set up a basis wiki on their system for free, but you have to pay a subscription to get premium service (such as removal of adverts, ability to customise the appearance of your wiki better, more control over who gets to see or edit your wiki, or more storage space for content).

The wiki editing advantage
Some of the advantages of using a wiki system: > ¶ In contrast, in a wiki you concentrate on editing only the main text content — and you can give it structure and links using a simplified form of markup, often called wikitext. Some wiki systems even provide a visual editor with a toolbar, so that it is like working in a word processor. Wikispaces has an visual editor that is remarkably easy to use, if a bit limited in its scope. > ¶ What if you are running a wiki, and you don’t like the default page layout and typography? Most wiki systems have been put together by a community of developers who have devised a number of alternative themes, and if you have ‘management’ rights within your wiki you will be able to explore those themes, choose an alternative one, customise the colours, upload a logo and stuff like that. If you have the skills and the confidence to hack into the CSS and software — and the wiki system you have chosen affords you this flexibility — you may be able to customise the appearance more extensively. But the great thing is that people who edit the pages on a day to day basis don’t have to worry about this stuff. > ¶ In a wiki, as in a blog, your Web browser is the only tool you need, and you edit the pages over the Internet and save them right onto the wiki system. When you save, it’s updated — no need to transfer files. And you are not being given access to any part of the system where you could do mischief, intentionally or otherwise. > ¶ What if two people are trying to edit a page at the same time? This can of course happen, and people can accidentally overwrite each other’s edits. Different wiki systems handle the problem in different ways. Some do file locking, so that if someone checks a page out to edit it, no-one else can work on it simultaneously. MediaWiki (as used by Wikipedia) divides pages into chunks and lets people edit one part of the page only, while someone else might be working on another part. In Wikispaces (as happened at the Brunel workshop!) an ‘edit-crash’ is possible, but the system will try to reconcile simultaneous edits as best it can — and if that fails, you can usually recover a previous version of the page.
 * **Ease of editing** — in the traditional model of creating Web sites, you would need to know how to mark up text using the Hypertext Markup Language, or you would have to buy and learn a visual Web-page editor such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. (//And if there’s a bunch of you wanting to work together on a site, that’s either a lot of learning or a lot of money on software licenses, or both//!) True, learning to make Web pages the old-fashioned way gives you a lot of control over their appearance, and can be very satisfying if you are that kind of person, but if what you really want to do is to write content and keep it up to date and stick in the occasional photo, learning to code or to drive a visual editor is a lot of pain for not much gain.
 * **Off-the-peg design** — Because a wiki system makes up pages out of fragments, as mentioned above, the person contributing content doesn’t need to worry about the overall layout of the screen, the navigation system, the buttons, the colours, the choice of fonts and so on. All of that is taken care of by the software modules that put the pages together, and by the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files that manage the typography and the layout.
 * **No need to ftp** — In traditional Web site creation, you create the Web pages on your machine, then you send them to your Web server using file transfer software. To do that, you need file transfer access to the server (ftp access), with a username and password, and ftp access is not something that administrators are happy to give out willy-nilly!
 * **Multi-user access to the same Web space** — This of course is the essence of wikidom, that multiple users can have access to the information repository, add pages, change pages, and make links between pages and out to the outside world, add photos and other media.

What wikis usually don't allow
Although many would argue that the benefits of wikis outweigh their disadvantages, it is worth giving some thought to what is missing.
 * **offline editing** – with the old-fashioned approach to website development, you can work offline (while in a wi-fi blackspot, for example), and then upload the changes when reconnected to the net.
 * **automatic backup** – the now unfashionable ftp upload process does mean that you have a backup offline. If the worst happens, it should be relatively easy to start over with a new web host and upload your website to them. Taking your own backup of a wiki, whether it uses flat files or a database, is considerably more complicated.