Wiki Software: Beyond Blogs

The role of blogs as an alternative journalistic voice in the U.S. 2004 elections marked the emergence of the blog as a major political, cultural, and social force.
The next step in that revolution is coming from something called Wiki–software that allows not just one but thousands to contribute to a site quickly and easily. One of Wiki’s first fruits is Wikipedia.org, a free online encyclopedia of 1 million-plus articles that has been whipped together entirely by volunteers in just four years.
Wiki is a community on a shoestring: quick and easy to implement, easy to maintain, informal in tone, and thus totally open. It invites collaboration, relies on trust to prosper, and allows users to freely create and edit webpage content using any browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself. Like many simple concepts, “open editing” has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a website is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

Whether or not they fit the “quirky software technology” mold ascribed to them by the writer of the Times piece, there’s something undeniably cool about the Wiki concept of open collaborative Web authoring through browser text fields.