BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW OF WIKI
path: CATEGORY:NUWIKI > NUFILES:NUCLEUS.HELP > BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW OF WIKI

Something Wiki This Way Comes

Quoting directly from WikiPedia, the 800-pound gorilla of Wikidom, we learn:

A wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, to remove, or otherwise to edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii, where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something "quick" or "fast".

In simpler terms are the words from the inventor of Wiki's original description:

"The simplest online database that could possibly work."

Wikis are everywhere now. While Wikipedia rules the roost in terms of consumer awareness, there are thousands of Wikis and hundreds of Wiki packages available to facilitate running your own Wiki. An excellent source of information on hosting your own Wiki is at wikimatrix.org.

Companies of all sizes are now using Wikis to provide real-time, collaborative documentation, information, and practically anything else that can be described in text and pictures.

A friend of mine, who heads up an IT department at a large California bank, told me that his tech people have a Wiki for every single computer in the entire bank. When one of the techs make a change of any sort to one of the bank's computers, they document the change in the Wiki for that computer. The next person to work on that computer can simply open up its Wiki page and see its complete repair and configuration change history. I'd call that an excellent use of Wiki.

The way I see it, if I can't find it from my keyboard, the last place I want to look is in a bunch of books or reference manuals which are notoriously out of date and scattered across countless physical locations. Don't get me wrong, I love books, and I have been personally responsible for decimating several small forests for all the books I have written. But I don't need a printed answer to a quick question.

What I am speaking of here is the need for quick and easy access to specific information I need to get my job done, presuming my job involves a computer. We office dwellers will have to find other, more practical reasons to actually stand up once in a while and walk around.

If I may be allowed one small conceit here, when I developed Encyclopedia Pick for Pick Systems back in 1991-92, I employed many of the techniques that now show up as the basis of Wikis. I basically took every single token in the Advanced Pick system and created a database from them. Not only could this database be used to produce the printed documentation, but it was immediately available to anyone on-line to be able to access it. And most importantly, everyone could contribute to it, without having to go through the documentarian's in-baskets and six-week wait cycles.

And now, here in 2006, we're about to apply the same technique to Nucleus.

Next: Nucleus Does Wiki
Previous/Top: Something Wiki This Way Comes