Wiki Analysis Report

Wiki Analysis Report

Sabrina Miao


Table of Contents
What is a wiki?. 3
What can a wiki do for me?. 3
Wiki in education. 3
Wiki in business. 4
Choose your wiki 5
Wiki website. 5
Wiki engine. 6
Conclusion. 7
References. 8



What is a wiki?
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser.

A wiki can be thought of as a combination of a website and a Word document, groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using a standard web browser. Beyond this ease of editing, wiki has the ability to keep track of the history of a document as it is revised. Users can search the wiki’s content, and view updates since they last visit. Wiki support hyperlinks and has simple text syntax for creating new pages and cross links between internal pages on the fly.
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 non-technical users.

The most well-known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by, well, anybody who feels like it. It's a well-researched, well-written, and highly regarded source of information. If one person makes incorrect or inappropriate changes to an entry, others can roll the page back to the way it was before, or keep the changes and edit them further. Thousands of people police the site (or at least those areas in which they have expertise), fact-checking and editing as necessary, so the quality of the content generally remains high.

What can a wiki do for me?
As we know wiki is good for collaboration, so wiki is doing great in education and business area. A wiki opens the door to experts and shy silent types alike, increasing creativity, expertise, and productivity all around. Wikis end the waste of ricocheting emails and communication breakdowns-wikis literally get everyone “on the same page”.

Wiki in education
The wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for increasing the collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the result of their research. Wiki increases students engagement and participation.

We know that better interactions between students create a better learning experience for everyone. With just their web browser, students can use wiki to get answers to questions, dig deeper into issues, and work on projects at any time wherever they maybe, and not just during class time. Students can help each other to learn more effectively, enhance course materials, and save teacher’s time answering routine questions. “When students write a paper, they're usually only writing for their teacher. When they know their peers will read what they write, students care and they try harder.”(Mike Lawrence, Executive Director, CUE)

After each class, students are encouraged to go to the wiki site and put down”collaboratively” what they learned from the class, for example, they are building a website about the class, if one student finds another student ‘s mistake, he/she can edit or add to it freely. The teacher can gauge if the students understand the lesson, so that he/she can prepare for the following class. In this way, students can motivate and help each other to build a good academic website.

Wiki in business
The business wiki is one of the most powerful tool and is capable of transforming the nature of communication within a company. Designed as a simple-to-use collaborative tool, wikis have raisen through the ranks of content management systems. From replacing an internal knowledge base to providing templates for reports and memos, wikis are invading the workplace and changing the way we do business.

Global communications is pushing wiki further into the workplace. The ease-of-use makes it a great tool for dispensing information across the globe and the simplicity of editing makes it easy for satellite offices to offer input back to headquarters.
More than just keeping employees around the world informed, a global wiki provides a means for teams with members in different locations to work together seamlessly and share information on a project.

The information technology department can use wiki as a surrogate knowledge base that employees can use to solve the most common problems such as what to do when the database is unavailable, mail isn't being delivered, or documents aren't printing.
The human resources department can utilize a wiki to maintain an up-to-date employee handbook, dispensing information about health and making general office announcements.
Any department that has information for the rest of the company can put the strengths of a wiki to good use by streamlining communication channels.

Wikis can also play a role in enhancing meetings, and in some cases, replace them altogether. A wiki can be a great place to store meeting minutes and provide the opportunity for employees to offer additional input outside of the meeting.
As an example of just how far the wiki meeting can go, IBM held a global wiki meeting in September of 2006 with online discussions that lasted three days. Over 100,000 people from more than 160 countries participated in what IBM considered a highly-successful brainstorming session.

With wiki organization, all participants in the project can get the same information and are able to share ideas seamlessly. It provides a way to empower the employee and let them take ownership of the project, driving it with their own ideas and, in the end, providing better solutions.
Wikis are also designed to be a simple, easy-to-use collaborate documentation engine. They are also battle-tested with hundreds of millions of people using wikis every day. Because of their open design, they can be the perfect tool to provide documentation for a wide range of projects, from large to small, and from technical to non-technical.

Choose your wiki
Someone said one of the most outstanding technologies developed and improved during the last decade is the wiki engine. However, wiki is not suitable for everyone. For example, if you looking for an exchange of views. Wikis are not the best tool for airing opinions or carrying on conversation. If that’s your primary goal, I suggest you use a blog instead.

Wiki website
Wiki websites centralize all types of corporate data, such as spreadsheet, Word document, PowerPoint slides, PDFs - anything that can be displayed in a browser or downloaded to your own computer. eMit is similar to wiki, except eMit only authorize personnel can edit the files, where else wiki is open to everyone. Wiki websites offer widgets, such as chat rooms, calendar, image gallery and many more. Wiki website is free to registration, but if you need to enlarge the space or you require more services, you need to pay a fee. Each of those wikis has their own focus, for example, PBwiki focuses on Business and Education, Wikispaces is very popular in college, SocialText is Business-focused wiki. It would be a good idea to try some of the wikis, then choose the one that works for you. I have tried PBwiki, Wikispaces and Wetpaint, personally, I prefer PBwiki. I feel it is easier to create, no annoying ads and has nice user interface.

Wiki engine
The open source wiki engines are free to download, but require programming proficiency. The advantages of the wiki engine are extensible and flexible, for example, there is a bottom-up structure approach and simple navigation, it is possible to connect to other wikis and wikis have broad fields of application, such as blogs or search. There are many wiki engines for you to choose from, MediaWiki, TikiWiki and DokuWiki are voted the most popular wikis at the moment.

MediaWiki is used to run Wikipedia(the World’s largest online encyclopedia), it supports many languages, website user styles, multimedia and extension features, index of content items, edit tracking, talk pages and so on. MediaWiki is suitable for personal and education use.

TikiWiki can be used to create web sites and intranets. You can use TikiWiki for forums, chat rooms, poll taking, blog, file and image gallery, FAQ, calendar and a lot more can be used for collaboration.

DokuWiki is the best choice if you need to write documentation for a small or medium company. It eases the creation of structure content, it has a powerful syntax. All data is stored in plain text files and no database is required.

Conclusion
“The new writing is online writing: designing website, writing weblogs, and creating and managing wikis. New writers are redefining writing online, creating new forms and approaches for new audiences.”(English dept, Bemidji State University)
Wiki build trust between users, trust the people, and trust the process. Users share information, knowledge, experience through wiki, and they have fun from the sharing. Wiki provide a platform for collaboration and interaction, we can see wiki is creating a communication revolution.


References

Using wiki in education.(n.d.). Retrieved 10 March, 2009, from The Science of Spectroscopy: http://www.scienceofspectroscopy.info/edit/index.php?title=Using_wiki_in_education

Wiki Engines. (n.d.). Retrieved 10 March, 2009, from Iterating: http://www.iterating.com/productclasses/Wiki-Engines/products?start=20

Wikispaces. (n.d.). Plans and Pricing. Retrieved 14 March 2009, from http://www.wikispaces.com/site/pricing

Jason Harris. (March 17th, 2008). PBWiki Adds New Features to Compete in Wiki Market . Retrieved 14 March 2009, from http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/03/17/pbwiki-adds-new-features-to-compete-in-wiki-market/#comment-309451

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