Wiki

My next peeve. Wikis. Somehow, somewhere, some idiot who loved wikis decided that people could best understand wikis by having it written in a wiki page. Sir, who ever you are, I wish to flog the ever living daylights out of you. I want to pummel you. I want to have huge currents of electricity running through your reproductive organs. I wish to bash you with a frying pan. No pain, no suffering is too harsh for the evils you have perpetrated.

I've looked at a few Wiki pages just to make sure I wasn't being an idiot. Indeed, the pages are horrible, horrible, horrible.

I will now take the time to explain to you what Wiki is all about, and I shall not use a Wiki page to illustrate.

You've heard it takes a village to raise a child? This same kum-ba-yah mentality can be made to make webpages. You can have a bunch of people who edit the same webpage.

Let me give you an example. There's a website called Wikipedia. It's an online encyclopedia, which can be edited by anyone. Suppose you were interested in talking about podcasting.

First, you find the page on podcasting. Often, wikis have some search button. Find the appropriate search field, enter in podcast, and boom, you're on a webpage explaining podcasting.

You read over the webpage on podcasting and realize there's this cool new website that allows you to download cool new podcasts. You wish to add a link and explain the history of this website.

What do you do? Most Wiki pages have an "edit" button somewhere. Click on it. The entire Wiki page then appears in some editor, often written in a "Wiki language". If you've ever written a webpage, you typically learned some basic HTML. Wiki folks believe HTML is the devil, and too hard to learn. So they've invented a Wiki language, that allows you to put asterisks around a word to make it bold instead of putting HTML tags like <b> and </b>., which involve more typing.

This is a great idea except that everyone and their grandmother's grandson has a Wiki language. While HTML is more or less standard, Wiki languages come in literally hundreds of flavors. You have to find which one the Wiki site you're visiting uses, and learn how to use it. Fortunately, most will handle raw HTML just fine, thank you.

Anyway, the webpage appears in some Wiki language in an editor in your browser. You edit the Wiki adding, changing, and deleting words.

But what prevents graffiti? What prevents spamming or porn? The community does. If a Wiki webpage is popular enough, many people will look at it, and someone is bound to fix any problems (or so you hope). Most Wiki pages have version control, so they save all old versions of the page. That way, you can always switch the webpage back to an earlier version.

What are the basic things you want to do with a Wiki? First, you might want to make stuff bold. Or, you may want to link to a webpage. For example, maybe you want to make a new Wiki page on video podcasting. Rather than add it as additional paragraphs to the current webpage, you can write it as a Wiki word. A Wiki word capitalizes the first letter of two or more words. Thus, you might have a link called VideoPodcasting. Notice the "V" and "P" are capitalized. This is also called "camel case" though I don't know why.

When you finish editing a wiki page, and hit "done", there is a compiler that parses the page. If it sees a Wiki word like VideoPodcasting, it creates a link. When you see it on the page it may look like VideoPodcasting? with a question mark at the end. To the naked eye, it appears like a link. And indeed it is a link. But where does this link go? Click on it (no don't click on mine---it sends you to Yahoo) and it takes you to a new blank Wiki webpage.

When you go to that page, there should be an "edit" button for that page. Start editing your new webpage. Suppose VideoPodcasting already existed as a Wiki word. Then, it would link you to the pre-existing page. The drawback of a Wiki word is that the more there are, the more likely you are to add a Wiki link to some pre-existing page. Some Wikis allow you to control whether you are creating a new link or reusing an old one.

WikiWords are a shortcut to create new links or to reuse old ones without having to type anchor links with hrefs in HTML.

Now, all these Wiki pages require some Wiki software in the background. For example, if you wanted to start a Wiki, you would need some place to host the Wiki, plus some initial page where people could start a Wiki from. You'd have to hope the community is sufficiently big to grow the site, and all Wiki pages would have to be hosted at that site.

Wiki tries to foster a sense of community by allowing anyone to edit a Wiki page. At times, this fails, and some restrictions must be placed so not everyone can edit a Wiki page.

And that, my friend, should be a much better explanation of Wikis than most you'll find on the web.