NicJ.net

I like Wikis. What is a Wiki? Well, according to Wikipedia, it is “a website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration“. For example, you log onto a website, see that there’s a spelling error, hit the “Edit” button to correct it, and it’s instantly updated for everyone else. It’s a simple idea, but very powerful.

The website Wikipedia is a prime example of a Wiki — it is an online encyclopedia created by, and edited by, anyone and everyone. To date, there are over a million English articles on Wikipedia, and there are articles in hundreds of other languages as well. Anyonmous internet users create and edit these articles, keeping them up to date and accurate. I use Wikipedia almost as much as Google these days when I’m doing research. See below for other sites based around the idea of a Wiki.

A wiki allows for a community of people (often the internet community as a whole) to keep an up-to-date record of their knowledge.

So anyone, anonymously, can edit a wiki. Doesn’t this make Wikipedia, and similar sites prone to abuse, defacing, or inaccurate data? You bet’cha. But the great thing about a wiki is that as easy as it is to make changes, it is easy to revert these changes to a previous version (all old versions are saved, and there is good revision control). A wiki is only as strong as its’ community, but in the case of places like Wikipedia, there is a large global community of people who want to keep the content up to date, unbiased, and accurate.

There are also several other projects based around the idea of a Wiki. The Wikimedia Foundation has several free projects such as:
* Wikipedia – encyclopedia
* Wikibooks – textbooks and manuals
* Wikiquotes – quotes database
* Wikisource – source documents
* Wiktonary – dictionary
* Wikinews – news
* Wikispecies – directory of species

Very cool stuff.

I’ve also begun using a Wiki a personal organizer. I’ve converted much of My Documents into a wiki on a website that I own (that only I can read and edit). Why do this? Well, it provides me:
* A place to jot down notes on random things, like stuff that I might need to remember later. For example, notes on how to use X or Y, problems I’m working on at work (and how I solved them), how I did this or that, what I need to do later, ideas for projects, etc.
* Access from anywhere (home, work or my phone)
* Revision control (every change is saved)
* A simple interface to edit documents

I started using my wiki (I call it NiciWiki!) two weeks ago and I’m still using it quite a bit. It’s a bit slower than editing a document on my computer, but it provides the advantages above so I think it’s worth it.

There’s even a cool implementation of a wiki called TiddlyWiki that you can save on your hard drive — it doesn’t require any web server, and you can edit it any time (think storing it on a USB thumb drive in your pocket).