1. Your website is yours
Email, fax, and the telephone are tools you use every day. Why not the web, in the same way? You can become the publisher of your own website in hours— and you don’t have to do it alone. Your team can help you write content—even your customers will help.
2. No software
You should be able to control your website any time, from anywhere, with any computer. You shouldn’t have to install programs on your computer to change or control your website.
3. No costs for changes
You shouldn’t have to pay to change your website. While you may need technical assistance to get a website off the ground, once it’s up and running you should be able to add new pages, change any word, change any picture without paying anyone to do it—just like changing the message on your answering machine, or the signature on your letters. You can hire a vocal talent to record your voicemail message—just like you can hire a professional designer to work with your images. But you don’t have to.
4. No skills required
If you can read, type, and click, you can create a website. Having technical skills helps but not as much as having a clear idea of what you want your website to do. The only program you will ever need is a web browser.
5. Questions
Questions that we often hear about the nature of a wiki website:
QWhat is it?
For our purposes, it’s a way of creating web sites that requires no downloaded software and no html skills. It lets you edit, update, or add to your site from any internet-connected computer, anywhere, at any time, without the need to download either software or the website’s content. Security can be controlled by a system of passwords that regulate read-access and write-access site-wide, to groups of pages, and to individual pages.
Here’s a short YouTube video we found that explains the principles of wiki in plain English:
QWhy is that special?
Wiki gets used in two not-entirely distinct ways:
- As a tool for making websites quick and easy to create and maintain, and
- As a tool for collaborating on documents and plans.
And in either case, it frees you from reliance on an “expert” - you become your own webmaster.
- As a web development tool
It surpasses because it requires very little specialized knowledge - especially for routine updates to the content of existing pages - and because it is extremely fault-tolerant: every change (with very few, very limited exceptions) can easily be “rolled back” - undone with just two clicks of the mouse.
It provides amazing opportunities for teams of users to invent new ways to work together - and “teams of users” can mean anything from just you and your partner to the entire online community: that’s your choice.
No Geek Required — -- No Software Required
If you have a site, and you have a webmaster who maintains it for you, then you’re probably familiar with this common scenario: we’ve spotted a typo on the site, we have a new item to put up, and the site still displays information about an event that has passed. But the programmer is going to charge for a miniumum of an hour’s work, so we haven’t submitted our change requests yet - we want to save up enough to make it worth the price. Then, once the requests are in, we know we’ll probably have to wait a few days to see the changes on the site.
None of that has to happen any more - the moment you spot that typo, you can click ‘edit’ and make the change. Hit ‘save’ and the corrected site is live on the net. The minute the last guest walks out the door, you can click ‘edit’, remove the event that’s past, and add information about the new one on your schedule. Hit ‘save’ and the your site is completely up-to-date.
5.1 Multiple Editors of Text
Why would anyone want to use this wiki software and let other people, even well-intentioned ones, change his or her work (“mess with my text”)?
Depending on the intended function of a given web page, this might be a good thing in any of several ways:
1. The page contains a draft of a document on which you and others are collaborating.
Think of the hassle of sending a document out in email, and then trying to keep track of and integrate all of the revisions and suggestions that come in from individuals who are unaware of the changes others have made.
Think how much more efficient it is to have just one instance of the document:
- Online, where you and everyone in your group or on your team or committee can get at it
- From any internet-connected computer anywhere on the planet
- And can see how it looks now
- And can see all of the changes that have been made to it,
2. The page contains the outline of plans for a project or event.
If the initiator of the plan overlooks any aspect of its implementation (need for a cleanup crew, for example), someone else on the team can add it. Have a good list of steps to be taken, but don’t know who would be best suited, able and available to perform them? Let your team members volunteer their services.
3. Your site is designed to report on the present state of events for an organization with a diverse, independent group of participants.
Each participant can update his/her own section, or delegate that to someone who likes that kind of thing.
4. Your site reflects a rapidly-changing reality.
It can change as quickly as the contributing participants think of changes to make - “No Geek Required!”
5.2 Safety
Can it be safe, to have a site open for editing by anyone?
Although it is truly surprising how well this open access can actually work, that does not have to be the way your wiki operates. You may choose to lock your entire site, providing the password to only a select, trusted few. Many sites do use Wiki in this way.
You can lock any or all of your site from being edited - or even read - by unauthorized users. You can select portions that can be edited by invitation, or leave selected portions open for editing by any member of the public who has in interest in your content.
All of these options are completely under your control.
If your organization, and the content and purpose of your site, seem as if they might be suited to the “constructive anarchy” that an open wiki can potentially provide, talk to us - we love that stuff! We can direct you to references for some fascinating reading on the subject of “The Wiki Way,” and “Why Wiki Doesn’t Not Work”. As for security on this kind of site, bear in mind that it takes just two clicks to fix a vandalized page: one to view the page’s history (the list of changes, made WHEN and BY WHOM) and the second to restore a page to its pre-vandalized condition.
A persistent vandal may come back and make the changes again, but there are more people interested in a site’s integrity than in its defacement, so vandals just give up - there are far more challenging and rewarding targets.
From a would-be vandal’s perspective, think of it as being like:
Snatching candy from a baby,
Over and over;
When you never wind up with any candy,
And the baby always does.
6. So, how are wikis being used?
Some examples:
7. How is Wiki being received in the media?
From Time Magazine, 6 June 2005
- On collaborative business uses
“Business wikis are being used for project management, mission statements and cross-company collaborations. Instead of e-mailing a vital Word document to your co-workers—and creating confusion about which version is the most up-to-date—you can now literally all be on the same page: as a wiki Web page, the document automatically reflects all changes by team members.”
- On open wikis
“Naturally, there are also a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia’s open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views… But for the most part, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more… Vandals might as well be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.”
Some examples - groundbreaking uses
A group of volunteers has begun using collaborative wiki software to expedite the process of perusing thousands of pages of complex documents related to detainees held by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Great article; wonderful project.
