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Wikis are user-editable websites that enhance group learning and can be hosted on various platforms, sometimes for free with advertisements. The concept of wikis has evolved to emphasize a federation of editable pages rather than a single site, and they operate under a soft security philosophy allowing for easy corrections of mistakes. Concerns about content reliability exist, but proponents argue that community oversight helps maintain accuracy, especially in specialized fields like medicine.

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2 views

History

Wikis are user-editable websites that enhance group learning and can be hosted on various platforms, sometimes for free with advertisements. The concept of wikis has evolved to emphasize a federation of editable pages rather than a single site, and they operate under a soft security philosophy allowing for easy corrections of mistakes. Concerns about content reliability exist, but proponents argue that community oversight helps maintain accuracy, especially in specialized fields like medicine.

Uploaded by

putluruneeraj
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group

learning. On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the
online Oxford English Dictionary.[22]

Alternative definitions
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the word "wiki" was used to refer
to both user-editable websites and the software that powers them,
and the latter definition is still occasionally in use. [1]

By 2014, Ward Cunningham's thinking on the nature of wikis had


evolved, leading him to write[23] that the word "wiki" should not be
used to refer to a single website, but rather to a mass of user-
editable pages or sites so that a single website is not "a wiki" but
"an instance of wiki". In this concept of wiki federation, in which the
same content can be hosted and edited in more than one location in
a manner similar to distributed version control, the idea of a single
discrete "wiki" no longer made sense.[24]

Implementations
See also: List of wiki software
The software which powers a wiki may be implemented as a series
of scripts which operate an existing web server, a
standalone application server that runs on one or more web servers,
or in the case of personal wikis, run as a standalone application on a
single computer. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page
content, while others use a relational database,
[25] as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly
for searching.

Hosting
See also: Comparison of wiki hosting services
Wikis can also be created on wiki hosting services (also known
as wiki farms), where the server-side software is implemented by
the wiki farm owner, and may do so at no charge in exchange
for advertisements being displayed on the wiki's pages. Some
hosting services offer private, password-protected wikis
requiring authentication to access. Free wiki farms generally contain
advertising on every page.

Trust and security


Access control
The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers,
authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. System
administrators are responsible for the installation and maintenance
of the wiki engine and the container web server. Wiki administrators
maintain content and, through having elevated privileges, are
granted additional functions (including, for example, preventing
edits to pages, deleting pages, changing users' access rights, or
blocking them from editing).[26]

Controlling changes
"Recent changes" redirects here. For the Wikipedia help page,
see Help:Recent changes. For the recent changes page itself,
see Special:RecentChanges.

History comparison reports highlight the


changes between two revisions of a page.
Wikis are generally designed with a soft security philosophy in which
it is easy to correct mistakes or harmful changes, rather than
attempting to prevent them from happening in the first place. This
allows them to be very open while providing a means to verify the
validity of recent additions to the body of pages. Most wikis offer
a recent changes page which shows recent edits, or a list of edits
made within a given time frame.[27] Some wikis can filter the list to
remove edits flagged by users as "minor" and automated edits.
[28] The version history feature allows harmful changes to be
reverted quickly and easily.[13]

Some wiki engines provide additional content control,


allowing remote monitoring and management of a page or set of
pages to maintain quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be
alerted of modifications to them, allowing them to verify the validity
of new editions quickly.[29] Such a feature is often called a watchlist.

Some wikis also implement patrolled revisions, in which editors with


the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate.
A flagged revisions system can prevent edits from going live until
they have been reviewed.[30]

Wikis may allow any person on the web to edit their content without
having to register an account on the site first (anonymous editing),
or require registration as a condition of participation. [31] On
implementations where an administrator is able to restrict editing of
a page or group of pages to a specific group of users, they may
have the option to prevent anonymous editing while allowing it for
registered users.[32]

Trustworthiness and reliability of content


Critics of publicly editable wikis argue that they could be easily
tampered with by malicious individuals, or even by well-meaning
but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content.
Proponents maintain that these issues will be caught and rectified
by a wiki's community of users.[2][17] High editorial standards in
medicine and health sciences articles, in which users typically use
peer-reviewed journals or university textbooks as sources, have led
to the idea of expert-moderated wikis.[33] Wiki implementations
retaining and allowing access to specific versions of articles has
been useful to the scientific community, by allowing expert peer
reviewers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they
have analyzed.[34]

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