Chances are that you have heard of Wikis by now -- they seem to be popping up everywhere. For example, The most famous wiki is called Wikipedia, a massive online encyclopedia. Wikipedia has become so large (more than a million articles) that you run across it all the time in Google. It is so popular that it is now one of the Top 100 web sites in the world!

Despite their popularity, Wikis seem very strange to many people. Where does all the information come from? Is it reliable? What stops people from vandalizing a wiki until it dies? These questions and many others will be answered as we dive into the world of wikis...

What is a Wiki?

The First Wiki Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995. His "WikiWikiWeb" lets software developers create a library of "software patterns." The name "Wiki" was inspired by the Hawaiian word wiki or wiki-wiki, which means "quick" and is often used as a term for taxis and airport shuttles. The WikiWikiWeb still exists.

Wikis are growing because, at their core, they are about as simple as can be. That simplicity means that people find them easy to use, just like e-mail and blogs. Like e-mail and blogs, wikis also perform a very useful service in a simple way. A wiki allows a group of people to enter and communally edit bits of text. These bits of text can be viewed and edited by anyone who visits the wiki.

That's it. What it means is that, when you come to a wiki, you are able to read what the wiki's community has written. By clicking an "edit" button on an article, you are able to edit the article's text. You can add or change anything you like in the article you are reading.

This simplicity and the utter openness of a wiki cause many people to instantly reject the idea. They assume that because anyone can edit a wiki at any time, the wiki must be flawed. But wiki supporters claim this is an incorrect assumption. Let's look at a real wiki to understand what is actually going on.

Understanding Wikipedia
Because Wikipedia is the largest and most popular wiki on the planet, we will use it as an example to understand how wikis work in practice.

If you go to Wikipedia.org and look at the home page, you'll see a welcome screen that shows you how to access different versions of Wikipedia, along with a search box.

Wikipedia.org home page

Type "wing warping" into the search box, and you will arrive at a typical Wikipedia article. The "Wing warping" page offers a brief description of wing warping, links to several related articles inside Wikipedia and several external links.

This is normal for any wiki -- a wiki is nothing but a collection of Web pages interconnected with each other through internal links. In Wikipedia, there are more than a million pages like this in the English version.

If you read the article, you will find that it is a useful source of information. It simply tells you what wing warping is and directs you to other resources. Despite the fact that anyone can edit the page (even you), there is no pornography, profanity or Nazi slogans on the page. All the material is completely on-topic.

Now we can ask the key question when it comes to Wikis -- where did this page on wing warping come from? Who wrote it? With any "normal" encyclopedia, the answer to that question is simple -- the encyclopedia paid someone to write the article. With Wikipedia, the answer to that question is completely different.

The Creation of Wikipedia Pages
At the top of the "Wing warping" page in Wikipedia, you see a tab that says, "Edit this page." That is a wide-open invitation to anyone -- any visitor to Wikipedia (including you) can edit any page. If you have something to say about wing warping that you feel should be on the page, or if you have an external link that you believe would be helpful to other readers who are reading about wing warping, or if you're compelled to write something completely unrelated, then you can add whatever you have to say to the page. Simply click on the "Edit this page" tab and type away.

Editing in Wikipedia When you edit Wikipedia, you do so using something called "Wikitext." For normal paragraphs of text, you simply insert the text. For special features like headings, lists, italics, etc., you use special character combinations. For example, if you place two equals signs at the beginning of a line ("=="), it means that you want to create a heading. To learn the symbols, looked at the page on editing.

To many people who have never spent any time with an active wiki before, that last sentence is uncomfortable. The idea that anyone can come to Wikipedia and edit any page at any time and do so with complete anonymity is extremely disconcerting. Obvious questions arise immediately:

• What if the person doing the typing has no idea what he/she is talking about?
• What if the person is a vandal and inserts profanity?
• What if the person is a vandal and either completely erases the page or corrupts it?
• What if the person is a spammer from a porn site who adds porn links and pictures to the page?

While it does happen, that kind of thing is relatively rare. The key thing that makes a wiki work is its community. Using a variety of tools, the community sees to it that vandals, dummies and spammers do not corrupt the encyclopedia.

Let's learn more about this community.