Transcript Presentation!

WIKIS
C@CM Final Presentation
Joseph Dziekan, Meghan Mills, Anna Rosenblum, & Cassie Wallace
WHAT
ARE WIKIS?
• Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “fast”
• first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1994 and was called
the WikiWikiWeb
• most popular wiki is Wikipedia
• Wikis were embraced in enterprise as “collaborative software” and
mostly traversed by the technical user at beginning of 21st century.
• some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and
as a replacement for static intranets
• Many enterprises use private wikis for internal documentation which
are highly specialized, unlike Wikipedia.
• Wikis are used broadly today by all different types of people for
research, social experiments, and as a simple way to share
information.
• On March 15th 2007, wiki entered the Online Oxford English
Dictionary
HOW
DO WIKIS WORK?
• Content Management System - software
that enables one to add and/or manipulate
content on a Web site
• Wikipedia is currently the most popular
wiki
• Wikis contain many articles (like a
reference book)
• They also contain a search box and
hyperlinks
BENEFITS
• Wikis can be edited by any person who is
able to access its contents
• Very useful while working in groups:
allows members to stay totally in sync and
store shared information such as
passwords to shared resources
CRITICISMS
• exposure to obvious or subtle
vandalism
•attempts by strongly opinionated editors
to dominate articles
•inaccurate or non-existent sourcing for
controversial assertions in articles
•edit wars and other types of nonconstructive conflict among editors
OPINION PIECE
SETH FINKELSTEIN / THE GUARDIAN / THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 25 2008
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has joined a speaker's agency. His pitch starts: "Imagine a world in
which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge ... To create and
distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their
own language."
But history tells a different story, one extensively entangled with commercial goals and ad-supported
websites. In the early days, nobody foresaw how successful Wikipedia would become.
Nowadays, Wales often presents Wikipedia as a precursor or prototype for his venture capital-backed
startup company, Wikia Inc. Wikia is sometimes summarised with the slogan "Wikipedia is the
Encyclopedia. Wikia is the rest of the library." But libraries are not dedicated to making profits by selling
advertising on every page of their books while having authors write the books for free (How will Wikia cope
when the workers all quit the plantation?)
A recent article in Trader Monthly Magazine …describes Wales's previous failed entrepreneurial ventures,
leading to "... his effort to take the success of Wikipedia, and commercialise the hell out of it".
It's informative to observe how long Wales has been pursuing a strategy of selling advertising around other
people's work. Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the
fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping.
WORKS CITED
• 29 Sep 2008
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/wiki.js
p#whatsawiki
• 29 Sep 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
• 29 Sep 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/25/w
ikipedia.internet
• 29 Sep 2008
http://www.govst.edu/elearning/default.aspx?id=1298
4
• 29 Sep 2008 http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
• 29 Sep 2008
http://webtrends.about.com/od/wiki/a/what_is_a_wiki
_2.htm
• 29 Sep 2008