Friday, August 03, 2007

Wikiwiki, what's a wiki?

We’ve all seen, heard about and even used Wikipedia and other Wikis, but what does Wiki mean? Well, wikiwiki means “quick” in Hawaiian. A wiki is a place online where anyone can access and edit it. Thus, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia online that anyone can edit and write to. You may have written something in a particular section of Wikipedia or you may have noticed glaring mistakes in Wikipedia. Don’t be afraid, go in there and correct the mistakes! That’s the whole nature of Wikipedia. It’s an encyclopedia for all of us.

There are also other wiki’s online, try Wikitravel, a “project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable world-wide travel guide.” A favorite of mine is LyricWiki, a free site to get reliable song lyrics. Then, of course, there’s Wiktionary, a collaborative, multilingual dictionary. Oh! Check out TV IV! It’s a “compendium of television knowledge”! You can see a list of some of the largest wikis out there by going here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_wikis.

How about creating your OWN wiki? You can do that too. There are several places you can do that, PeanutButterWiki, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and Wikia. Try one out!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

this one is very informative. I didn't know much about it until now.