Wikis for DUMMIES

Wikis for DUMMIES

The History and Future of Wikis

So far, the idea of wikis has been explained from the general to the specific: from the outside-in, is one way to say it. To better understand the essence of wikis, understanding wikis from the inside-out is also useful. How did the idea originate? What was Ward Cunningham's mission when he developed the wiki concept? What were the false starts? How did the idea of a wiki flower into being? The following sections explore some of the history behind wikis as well as the directions in which they might go.

HyperCard and other wiki precursors

You can find many wiki-like things in the past. For example, Tornado Notes, which became InfoSelect, was a database of free-form notes. And FolioViews made it easy to link between pages. Of all the precursors, HyperCard is probably the most wiki-like thing that existed before wikis. HyperCard was a program created by Bill Atkinson for organizing information; when it came out in 1987, it was distributed with every Macintosh computer sold.

HyperCard used the metaphor of index cards and stacks of cards. On each card, fields of information could be stored, text could be entered, and cards could be linked. Boy, this sounds a lot like a wiki. What wasn't wiki-like about HyperCard was that it was not on the Web. In their first incarnation, HyperCard stacks could be used on a single computer or a bunch of computers sharing a file system where a common stack could be accessed. Still, HyperCard stacks weren't created to allow anyone on the Internet to be able to access them through a browser. This is a big difference from wikis.

Wikis go commercial

The growth of wikis certainly didn't happen in a vacuum. The technology press paid attention as did a few academics. As in the open source and engineering communities, there was much activity. New wiki engines were created every year, and still are. (Dan's current favorite newcomer is TiddlyWiki, a wiki created by using JavaScript, that is contained within an HTML page.) Wikis were created for special purposes: DokuWiki is an excellent wiki engine created for writing and publishing documentation. Microsoft created a wiki engine called FlexWiki as an open source project built by using .NET technology.

Recognizing that the basic concepts of wikis were quite powerful, and that a large segment of the information technology world (the world of corporate computer users) was nervous about the support and maintenance burdens of open source technology, a number of entrepreneurs stepped in and built on the ideas that were developed in the open source wiki engines. Some of these include:

• Socialtext [1]: Ross Mayfield created Socialtext, which built a product to deliver the benefits of many of the technologies used in social networking as an integrated product. Socialtext combines blogs, wikis, and other features to create an environment to help groups communicate and do work.

• JotSpot: JotSpot, founded in 2004 by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, calls itself an application wiki. JotSpot offers a wiki with many features, such as e-mail integration and database-like functionality, which allow it to create wikis that are applications but also wikis. JotSpot was purchased by Google in October, 2006.

• Atlassian (http://www.atlassian.com): Atlassian, an Australian company, created Confluence, what it calls an enterprise wiki that complements the company's first product, JIRA (a bug-tracking database). Confluence is one of the more popular wikis in corporate environments.

Different types of Link Creation in Wikis:

1. Google (http://www.google.com): Visit the site today!!!
2. Google: What ya say!!!
3. Google [2]: Google Chrome beta now available.
4. Google [3]: Google Chrome beta now available.

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