What Is Wiki?

What Is Wiki?
Wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects.

Somewhere, in a dimly lit classroom, a library bench, or in a home study, some lucky so-and-so is writing an essay from beginning to end with no notes. This splendid individual is able to craft entire sections without forgetting by the end what the section was intended to include at the beginning, and can weave a carefully paced argument with thoughts and references collected over a period of months, all perfectly recollected. Neither of your authors is this person. Instead, we need help, and that help comes in the shape of a wiki.

A wiki is a website where every page can be edited in a web browser, by whomever happens to be reading it. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects. This tutorial is about how to effectively use a wiki to keep notes and share ideas amongst a group of people, and how to organize that wiki to avoid lost thoughts and encourage serendipity.

This article was written using a wiki, as were most of the 100 hacks in our book, Mind Hacks. The prime example of a wiki in action is Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia. Wikipedia is one of the best resources on the internet, and its quality and breadth lends credence to the wiki as a great tool. But it illustrates just one way of using the wiki.

Wikipedia builds on transparency, simple linking, and a low barrier to entry for crowds of people to be involved in editing and authoring. We can use these same qualities with just two or three people for a different outcome: a shared workspace and, in effect, a shared memory.

As with any large project, we found that a book was too big to hold in mind all at once, and definitely too big to guarantee remembering those many promising ideas that came up at times we were least able to pursue them. Some of these ideas would start as off-the-cuff thoughts and, when followed up, grow to change large parts of our major concept. So it was important to record them, and give them room.

A large number of recorded ideas means, of course, that it's easy to get out of sync with project partners, and that's where the wiki as shared memory comes in. Using a Wiki for your big projects keeps all participants on the same page.
Read: WEP

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