Semantics in Wiki - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 237

l Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups, ranging
from real-time instant messaging to asynchronous collaborative teamwork
spaces. This category also includes collaborative commenting on, and within,
blog spaces.
l Support for social feedback that allows a group to rate the contributions of
others, perhaps implicitly, leading to the creation of digital reputation.
l Support for social networks to explicitly create and manage a digital expression
of people's personal relationships and to help them build new relationships.
10.2.2 Wiki
Wikis are a well-known Web 2.0 content management platform. The first wiki was
designed by Cunningham and Bo Leuf [ 4 ] in 1995 because they wanted to make
their hypertext database collaborative. Their idea was that it would be a collabora-
tive community Website where anyone can contribute. Anyone should be able to
edit any page from a simple Web form. Making the site easily editable gives it
numerous advantages. This is because it encourages many people to participate in
creating the Website together, making Wikis a very useful knowledge base. Wikis
are being used in many organisations to provide affordable and effective Intranets
and for knowledge management purposes. Since 1995, many wiki-inspired pro-
grammes and Wiki Websites have been created. Some Wiki knowledge bases
include: Wikipedia, The Tcl'ers Wiki, The Emacs Wiki, British Telecom, TWiki,
Colorado State University, USA, etc. All of them share the following common
properties [ 1 ].
l Edit via browser
l Simplified wiki syntax
l Rollback mechanism
l Strong linking
l Unrestricted access
l Collaborative editing
A Wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build up a corpus of
knowledge in a set of interlinked Web pages, using a process of creating and editing
contents. Wikipedia is the most famous Wiki. There are many possible uses for a
Wiki, including research collaboration, multi-authored papers, project work and
maintenance of documents that require regular updating. Some people describe
Wiki as a collaborative content management system. It means that a Wiki allows
multiple people to work on the same document.
Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the
Internet. They can be described as a composition system, a discussion medium, a
repository, a mail system and a tool for collaboration. Wikis provide users with both
author and editor privileges; the overall organisation of contributions, as well as the