computer drone

http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

That gave me some good starting information, and an intriguing definition…

Wiki is in Ward’s original description:

The simplest online database that could possibly work.

I’m going to copy/paste part of the definition directly from the website because it’s easier to talk about it with a frame of reference:

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, “open editing” has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

Now, check out wikipedia at http://www.wikipedia.org/ and be prepared to get lost in the tunnels for days… weeks… months. It claims to be:

The biggest multilingual open access encyclopedia on the internet. Over 500000
articles and still growing.

I shared it with a student who had to research the 26th amendment for his government class. I didn’t see him for 2 weeks! (only kidding!) He started off with the 26th amendment and ended up reading about a Japanese shogunate and couldn’t tell me how he got there! He just kept clicking links. It reminded me of the food web activities we would do with a ball of yarn… stand in a circle and toss the ball of yarn around to form a web… and at the end, one student was told to “drop his web” and the whole thing collapsed.

A definite advantage is the ability of anyone to edit at any time. Perhaps this is also a disadvantage as well, for how does one assure accuracy? I can see a similarity to Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

Nevertheless, if you’ve never visited the world of Wikipedia, go to http://www.wikipedia.org/ and give it a whirl. You have to admire the structure, if not the content.