mediajunk

I’m starting to believe that wikis are the web’s next big thing.

I first heard the term wiki during the last few weeks, although apparently it’s been around since 1995. Recent articles have cropped up explaining what wikis are and why everyone should have one, including an essay by Nathan Matias on Sitepoint.com, which does a good job of introducing the subject.

A pretty good job, that is, except for the fact that his opening definition of wikis is too vague:

“Different people have different ideas about what a wiki really is, but whatever angle you look at it, a wiki is software that handles complex problems with simple solutions.”

Well, that could describe anything from online banking to flight reservation software -- neither of which are wikis.

The definition by wiki pioneer Ward Cunningham -- "the simplest online database that could possibly work," doesn't explain very much either.

First and foremost, a wiki is a collaborative website. Visitors can, in some cases, edit the pages of the site. Indeed, some wikis let any visitor edit any page – a crazy decision, you might think, but apparently it works.

The idea is that the wiki is maintained by a community of users who, for the most part, want to see its content grow and evolve so as to be useful to all. Sure, there will always be a few vandals who want to change one of the pages. But one of the great features of a wiki is that any visitor can restore the page to one of its earlier states, so the vandal’s efforts can easily and quickly be undone.

Indeed, “wiki” itself is Hawaiin for “quick”. The wiki tool lets users create pages and hyperlink trails quickly, so that the site evolves in real-time with its community.

The reason I linked to Matias’s article was not for his definition, then, but for his nice explanation of how wikis conform much better to the “hypertext” paradigm -- unlike first- and second-generation websites.

Matias rightly quotes Vannevarr Bush, the person who first envisaged the world of interconnected hypertext documents, in his seminal 1945 article, “As We May Think.” He imagined that the Memex (the name he gave to an imaginary construct that today sounds like the internet) would be an extension of our memory, rich with links between different documents.

One of the trends I have noticed in the evolution of the web during the last ten years is that, in the “early” days, web pages were created like print documents – i.e. much of the web was “brochureware”.

In the late 1990s, Big Business, and the IT industry in particular, jumped on board the internet bandwagon. Realising that the web medium had a lot more power than print, self-proclaimed gurus hyped the coming of “online multimedia," “personalization” and “portals.”

None of these concepts really took off – because they all borrow too heavily from traditional (read: old) media, which use the “broadcast” model. With old media, the organisation creating and disseminating the content has ultimate control over its messages. Not so on the web -- at least, not if you want to engage a community.

The internet was, right from the beginning, about creating and empowering communities. That’s what businesses failed to see, and it cost them dearly when the bubble (built on the hype I mentioned above) burst.

As the dust settles, however, we are seeing the true nature of the new medium emerge. Weblogs – where publishing is effortless and visitor comments, trackback links, etc. are part of the weblog experience – are one example of this.

The shape-shifting techniques used by Amazon, Ryze and Sitepoint (to take three from the top of my head), where the way the information on the site is presented to you depends on your own actions and trails through that site, represent a second example.

Wikis are a third, though they have yet to take off in the way that weblogs have. But as users become more web-savvy, wikis will explode in popularity.

The web hasn’t stopped evolving; it’s only getting started. Watch out for wikis!