What is a Wiki?
The following notes have been put together by BCSE member Alan Bellis who set up the wiki-part of our web site for us:
Anyone who has any knowledge of building websites will know how just how complicated adding information to a website can be. You have to use special software to build the page then upload it to the server. All this requires technical skills & further limits what can be done as a team because there is no central master copy; each person is only updating their local copy stored on their machine.
Wiki software overcomes these problems by editing the website live & making immediate changes using wiki mark up that anyone can quickly learn to use. This makes it much easier for groups of people with limited knowledge of website programming to participate & collaborate in the construction of a website.
In principle that is all a wiki is: a specific type of website building software. Any website built with that software is therefore a wiki – end of story. Some of them allow unrestricted editing or viewing of the contents, whilst others don’t. But it makes absolutely no difference to whether it is a wiki or not, because you are still using the same wiki software & the same wiki markup. For example, peanut butter wiki which I experimented with before settling on PmWiki allows a wiki to be private & incorporates password protection as standard. See:
http://pbwiki.com/tour/3.html
Although the average uninformed person will only have heard of wikis in relation to the larger encyclopaedia type sites, which do allow open editing, the vast majority in use by businesses, private individuals & educational establishments such as universities, don’t. There is no law that says you have to allow your hard work to be destroyed by spammers & online hooligans.
