What's with the Wiki?

Again in keeping with the WWW motif we've established, you may be asking yourself: What's with the wiki? From my own personal experience, I can attest to the usefulness of a wiki system.

I have always thought of myself as being pretty well organized, but in the end, I still end up asking myself where I put things, like everybody ends up doing at some point or another. Where my organizational skills break down almost always is in the management of files with little thoughts and ideas I jot down for projects I'm working on or I would like to start in the future. I'll invariably end up saying one day: 'I thought I jotted something down about how to fix this bug'. The problem goes just beyond 'grepping' some keywords in files on my hard disk. That would work just fine if the stuff actually existed, but with some of my periodic hard disk cleanings, useful information like this sometimes gets erased. This kind of disorganization when you're working in the IT business means lost productivity and that's not a good thing. Luckily, it finally occurred to me to use a wiki system to keep my useful information at my fingertips.

More about wikis

As we mentioned, a wiki is a web-based system to create content. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham for his Portland Pattern Repository. The aim was, as in most wikis, to make it easier for people to collaborate on creating content. Collaboration is facilitated by the fact that most wiki systems let practically anybody create and modify content. One of the most famous wikis, the Wikipedia website, is a giant multi-lingual wiki of encyclopedia entries which now rivals the famous dead tree versions. It is one of the most famous collaborative projects after the Linux kernel. Anybody can essentially go to that site and start creating or editing encyclopedia entries. Another similar project is Memory Alpha, a Star Trek information wiki. If you're a Star Trek fan, you can collaborate on creating content about this famous sci-fi franchise.

A software projects, particularly in the Open Source / Free Software world, are using wikis to create documentation and handle user queries. Of course, wiki implies openness, but I was surprised to find out that the developers working on Microsoft's new OS Longhorn have a wiki, called Channel 9. This shows that the need to easily create and maintain information and make it accessible to everyone (or anyone you choose) is universal and wikis provide the means to do it.

How Wikis Work

Basically, the software used to create a wiki is called a wiki engine. This is both a content display and editing system at the same time. Our website is not a wiki, so you can read this document but you can't edit it. If this were a wiki site, you could click on an edit link or button and the content would appear in a large multi-lined textarea field in your browser. You could then change anything you like about it and then save it. Most wiki systems have the means to keep track of who created a page, who edited it and when. You can even compare versions of the "page", tracking it back through previous edits. Wikis are also meant to free non-technical users from having to use traditional HTML markup in pages. For example, if I wanted to write something like:

You need to be very careful with this.

The words very careful are rendered in bold because I know how to use the <strong> </strong> or <b> </b> tags to produce this effect in HTML. Though this isn't a particularly difficult thing to learn, wiki systems make it so this and other more difficult kinds of HTML tags are not necessary. All one needs to do to produce this effect is to put simple characters before and after words, like *very careful* or '''very careful'''. The wiki software will convert these special characters into the appropriate HTML tag.

Speaking of tags, the most important feature of a wiki is the ability to link to other pages that have related content. If I created a wiki about herbs, for example, and I created a page about medicinal herbs, I could then create another page about chamomile simply by typing something like [[chamomile]] while editing the medicinal herbs page. When I save the page on medicinal herbs, there would appear a link to the page on chamomile, but it would show up in such a way as to indicate that the page is waiting to be created. By clicking on the chamomile link I would be taken to the page which displays a multi-lined edit field and I'm all set to create content. Let's say I've continued developing this wiki on herbs and I have a page dedicated to herbs used in cooking. While creating a page for say, rosemary, I could write something like:

Rosemary is also considered a [[medicinal herb]].

Of course, you could do all of this with traditional web content, but it would be time consuming keeping track of all the links and writing the markup by hand (<a href="). It's also very easy to make mistakes and link to pages that don't exist. By using this scheme [[a page]] the wiki software creates a link to 'a page' if it exists and if not, it creates it so you can then add content. That's where the wiki's advantage is clearly seen. You're moving around as in a spider web, directly to content that interests you - it's not a linear movement where you have to pass points B, C and D to get to E. Most wiki software comes with excellent search capabilities as well. You're never more than two clicks away from the content you're looking for.

Your Own Personal Wiki

As I mentioned before, I found in the wiki system the perfect way to get all my little notes, ideas, writings and anything else that made it from my brain to my keyboard under one roof, so to speak. If you're interested in setting up a wiki for this or for any other reason (if you need to collaborate with others), you just need to get some wiki engine and a Linux system, preferably, if you haven't already got one. It's easier to set this up on a Linux system, and even if it's going to be for your own use you'll need web server software. Most Linux distributions come with Apache, the most widely used web server. They also come with PHP, Perl and Python and most wiki software uses one of these programming languages.