Wiki science/Introduction

Wiki Science is a collection of information, reflections, guidelines on wikis.

Why do we need a science of wikis?

Wikis are an emergent phenomenon. They have huge potential. There is a lot of discussion of the science of wikis, how they grow and adapt, but it is spread all over hundreds of wikis. This textbook has a clear aim: To observe the development of the wiki phenomenon and to document its processes.

Adding concise information about creating and maintaining wikis has become a little part of the book.

The book itself is a wiki and it is probably the first real test of practicing Wikiresearch.

What ideas feed into the science of wikis

• Chaos theory
• Emergent behaviour
• Artificial life
• Cognitive neuroscience
• Total Quality Management

Glossary

A short overview of some known wikis - or less known wikis that tend to pop up in this textbook.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a copyleft encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to the standard encyclopedic knowledge, Wikipedia includes almanac and gazetteer-like information as well as current events. The content of Wikipedia is entirely created by its users. No single user owns the content; no article is ever finished. The license known as the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) is intended to ensure that everyone who can accept that license is an owner of the right to use and improve the article.

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a sister project to Wikipedia and is part of the Wikimedia foundation, begun on July 10, 2003. The project is a collection of free textbooks with supporting book-based texts, that is being written collaboratively on this website. The site is a WikiWiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit any book module right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears in every Wikibooks page.

Portland Pattern Repository

The Portland Pattern Repository was the first ever Wiki, and is sometimes referred to simply as Wiki (with a capital 'W') or WikiWikiWeb. It was created March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham. It is dedicated to pattern languages as they apply to computer programming, with an increasing emphasis on extreme programming. The site's defining phrase is "People, Projects & Patterns".

Other

Other terms used are:

Talk page

A "talk page" is a page meant for discussion of another page. In Wikibooks, the talk page of any page can be accessed by clicking "Discussion".

User page

In many wiki systems each user has his/her own user page. This usually contains elements such as a little bit of information about the user, and usually the pages which he/she is proud to have contributed to.

If you are logged in, you can access your user page by clicking "My page".

Mentoring

Mentoring in Wikimedia is the process of guiding a user who is less experienced. A person who is mentoring someone's goal is to guide the user into being a productive editor.

Sources

Some of this this book's text is based on Portland Pattern Repository, Wikibooks and Wikipedia.