Word: wikis
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...variety of publishers. The site draws heavily from Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers-anybody can contribute or edit articles, and some 16,000 have (there are 500,000 entries in English; the 2005 Encyclopaedia Brittanica has 65,000). See here for more on the wiki phenomenon. Answers.com also provides free plug-ins you can download to your desktop for even quicker access to these fast facts...
Inspired by Wikipedia, a Silicon Valley start-up called Socialtext has helped set up wikis at a hundred companies, including Nokia and Kodak. Business wikis are being used for project management, mission statements and cross-company collaborations. Instead of e-mailing a vital Word document to your co-workers-and creating confusion about which version is the most up-to-date-you can now literally all be on the same page: as a wiki Web page, the document automatically reflects all changes by team members. Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield claims that accelerates project cycles 25%. "A lot of people...
Wikipedia is in the vanguard of a whole wave of wikis built on that idea. A wiki is a deceptively simple piece of software (little more than five lines of computer code) that you can download for free and use to make a website that can be edited by anyone you like. Need to solve a thorny business problem overnight and all members of your team are in different time zones? Start a wiki. In Silicon Valley, at least, wiki culture has already taken root. "A lot of corporations are using wikis without top management even knowing it," says John...
...father of the wiki is Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb in 1995. The name came from his honeymoon in Hawaii, where you catch the "wiki wiki" (a Hawaiian term for "quick") bus from the airport. The WikiWikiWeb was an online help manual for all kinds of software, written a little bit at a time by hundreds of people around the world. Users of any given product, Cunningham knew, were like the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant. Their knowledge was far greater than the sum of its parts-greater than even the product's creator-if only...
Whatever happens to Wikipedia, the wiki genie is out of the bottle. There are wikibooks for collaborative nonfiction, wikipes for recipes and wikimedia for citizen journalists. Wales has a for-profit website, Wikicities, where anyone can form a community. (The two largest are geeking out on the chronologies of Star Wars and Star Trek.) "It's a form of brainstorming that's bigger than one person standing at a flip chart," says Cunningham. "And there's a timelessness to it. You can do a wiki over one year or 10." And have almost as much fun as Jimmy Wales does...