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Commentary: Wiki: The fast way to collaborative authoring

2005; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bmb.2005.49403305371

1539-3429

Graham R. Parslow,

Wikis in Education and Collaboration

At the time of writing, I am part of a team of four people trying to write a medical problem-based learning tutorial on childhood obesity. The team members are in four separate locations, and we E-mail each other snippets, but only when we physically meet does the whole emerge. Only one team member has the master version of the document. This is a partly E-assisted approach, but as I have come to appreciate this is the way of the information dinosaurs. The clever way to achieve this task is to use a wiki. I only discovered the existence of wikis a couple of weeks previously, and it seems to be a phenomenon well known to the computer-face technical people and only just impinging on the consciousness of senior staff. From Wikipedia, the free net encyclopedia [1], we find the definition “A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. Wiki also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website. Wiki (with an uppercase ‘W’) and WikiWikiWeb are both used to refer specifically to the Portland Pattern Repository, the first wiki ever created. The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki, meaning “quick” or “informal.” It is used commonly in Hawaii as part of its “Hawaiian Pidgin,” a native language of the state. Sometimes wikiwiki or Wikiwiki is used instead of wiki. Wikis began in 1995 when a programmer, Ward Cunningham, wrote some software that allowed free contributions of additional material to the Portland Pattern Repository. Cunningham had taken his honeymoon in Hawaii and caught the WikiWiki bus at the airport [2], and so this name became attached to his program. The catalyst for wider adoption of wikis was provided by the launching of the Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales [2]. Wales was looking for a way to use the net to create an experience comparable to his childhood pleasure of immersion in Britannica and the World Book Encyclopedia. Wales had used the Internet in 1989 and recalls “I met all these great people on-line, and we were all discussing things on mailing lists no one ever looks at. I thought, why not use the smarts of my friends and build something more long lasting, more fun?” [2]. Wales describes himself as a pathological optimist and quit his job in commerce, taking 2 years to start an on-line encyclopedia called Nupedia with a mere 12 articles produced in that time. Then Wales discovered wikis, and this was his “eureka moment.” His goal became to create an encyclopedia written by all who wanted to contribute. It took Wikipedia just 2 weeks to grow larger than its predecessor. Four years later, Wikipedia has 500,000 entries in English and is the cumulative work of 16,000 contributors, much larger than the 65,000 articles in the 2005 Encyclopedia Britannica. Testing Wikipedia by looking at the entry on enzymes revealed that the contributor(s) of this information had an indifferent tertiary education when I first looked at it a week previously. I recalled a line in the style “I know nothing about metals in enzymes so please write something here.” When I went back to locate this I discovered a much superior entry. I am thereby led to conclude that Wikis work. The disparaging quip of a Brittanica editor quoted in Ref. 2 seems rather churlish: “Wikipedia is like a public toilet seat because you don't know who used it last.” Wikis in general are challenged by problems of corruption by biased contributors, but major wiki engines such as MediaWiki, MoinMoin, UseModWiki, and TWiki provide ways to limit write access and to restore previous versions [3]. Asking around my lunch table, I learnt of Lisa Wise, a wiki expert in our medical faculty. She showed me “Lisa's wiki” that she uses to compile instructions for using services in the faculty. She told me that ever more laboratories are using wikis to keep lists of references and experimental results that dynamically build. I was told that the cooperative paradigm did run into problems when members became proprietary about their intellectual property, but overall wikis work well. Lisa also introduced me to the self-explanatory word WikiEtiquette. It seems that males and females are equally able to wiki (I suspected that females might be better because they are considered to be more cooperative in collaborations). The first conference on wikis is about to be held (International Symposium on Wikis, October 17–18, San Diego, CA, www.wikisym.org) with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the original WikiWikiWeb, to present the opening keynote address. Wikis have all the indications of being a major new way of collaboration.