Wiki: A Collaborative Software

Have you ever seen a public or office bulletin board? Well, that's exactly what a wiki is . It is a website which acts like a bulletin board where a user is allowed to create and edit the pages. It is a Hawaiian term meaning 'quick'. It can also be defined as a group comunication mechanism and a platform which has exposed the web visitors and users to millions of new words and content. But not all wikis are open to every visitor to edit or create pages. Some of them have restrictions over who can edit the pages.

wiki versus blog

If you understand the difference between individual and group presentation, you will easily understand the difference between a blog and a wiki. A blog is published by one individual, whereas a wiki is a collaborative software where groups of people design and publish the work in an easy and inexpensive way.

wiki versus email

Now you might say what is unique in a wiki as even emailing a word file around too is a way of collaborating on content or projects. The difference is that in wiki, once the changes are made to a document, everybody gets to see the same page as edited by the last user. There is also a facility to restore the earlier versions of the pages as you can store and keep the history of every change that has been made to the document till the present day.

An open forum for all

In the world of internet and web, where people are looking for more and more relevant and useful content, wiki will turn out to be a great help for groups interested in collaborating on projects and content. Wiki can be very beneficial in not only desiging and managing, but also maintaining the documents that need the inputs from the users all over the globe.

The other side of the coin:wiki abuse

The very features that make wiki a popular and useful internet tool, also make it vulnerable to mischief and abuse by mischief mongers. Since a wiki's links are open for all, if there is no human control or close monitoring, users can simply add their links to take advantage of wiki's network. And the culprit user will savor the benefits of this activity, till the time some other user does not remove that link. The profit hungry website owners deliberately do not want to understand that wiki took shape as a result of a desire to collaborate on content and not as a means to increase your page rank.

One Useful Tip

If you want to find out whether you rivals and competitors are indulging in foul practices to increase their pagerank and position in search engines, all you have to do is search for your competitor's business name+wiki. If you find them there on a wiki spamming ride, you can write a form letter informing the wiki owner with their IP address about their degrading act and keep a check on them.