Welcome to Participatory Media Literacy (Home)
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Chat: Channeling the Backchannel
Transliteracy
Forecasting: Thinking long term, developing foresight
Participatory Media Education Resources
A wiki is a website or digital document that anyone can edit, using very simple markup language and hyperlinking to create visually consistent, interconnected pages of information. Most wikis are collaborative websites that can be edited by any user, though some require registration or a password. Wiki software has been written for many different web platforms, and are usually installed server-side, but there are also desktop wikis and even PDA wikis. Wikis allow for collaborative communities that can share knowledge and ideas with minimal technical know-how, so that any user can be a writer, editor and content creator and groups can harness collective intelligence to co-author documents.
The word "wiki" comes from a Hawaiian word for "quick". Wikis were invented about 10 years ago by Ward Cunningham. Wikis became the collaboration tool of choice because they are simple and flexible to create and edit, because every version is saved and easily findable, because it is easy to learn the syntax of any wiki by inspecting it via the "edit this page" link that all wikis have, and because mistakes or damage can be repaired with a single click.
A wiki is the essence of participatory media -- a community, not an individual, is the author of many wiki documents. Peer to peer communication channels and social norms, substitute for chains of command and rules. Such communities can work together to become knowledge communities and create public goods -- Wikipedia, a volunteer-created encyclopedia that anybody can edit -- is the most well-known example of such a community-created public good.
Page Last Updated: Feb 16 12:57pm by Howard Rheingold