Introduction

 Wikis

"Wiki," which means quick in Hawaiian, refers to software that enables users to easily collaborate on documents on the Web. Thanks to the simplicity of the wiki writing environment, writers can publish attractive Web pages without knowing Web markup languages such as XML or Web authoring tools such as Microsoft's FrontPage, Adobe's Dreamweaver, or Netscape’s Composer. Wikis offer authors a way to share the writing and editing process with other authors all over the world.  Wikis are an ideal authoring platform for students who are assigned collaborative projects in writing classes.

Ward Cunningham, a computer programmer and the inventor of the WikiWiki concept, founded the first wiki site, the Portland Pattern Repository, in 1993. According to Wikipedia, an online wiki encyclopedia, Cunningham claims that “the wiki concept came to him in the late 1980s, and he implemented it first in a HyperCard stack” (Wikipedia). Cunningham defines wikis as “the simplest online database that could possibly work.” However, wikis are far more than online databases—they can be online communities where authors collaborate.

Wikis have not captured the popular imagination as blogs have, yet wikis have the potential to radically influence writing and collaboration in academic and professional contexts. Wikis require that authors see their writing as part of a fluid, dynamic, and collaborative process rather than as a stable, finished product.

Wikis are the tool of choice when collaborative work is required. Wikis allow readers to view and revise wiki pages using an Internet browser. Wiki software records all changes made in the wiki. Thus, if you were the author of wiki "Page A" and it was revised 100 times by 10 users, you could access each and every change by viewing the page’s history. If you were author of version 88, you could restore or “rollback” that version of the page in seconds. These features expose all stages of the writing process and create a very dynamic environment for revision and collaboration. 

Wikis are much more than a tool that makes it easy to work online. Wikis promote an emphasis on collaborative writing, revision, and writing processes. Wiki authors are constantly revising each other’s work for the betterment of the wiki as a whole. For example, a chemistry professor may drop in to revise some notes about a chemical reaction; it’s even possible that a professional author may visit a wiki site dedicated to her work and add her own perspective.

Some wikis are password protected and some wikis enable users to protect individual pages from being changed by others. Yet most wikis follow the “wiki way,” which means they democratize writing: they allow users to edit, delete, or revise any page.

Perhaps the best example of "the wiki way" is Wikipedia, a remarkably successful wiki encyclopedia. Founded by Jimmy Wales in January of 2001, Wikipedia began as an experiment. Wales set up the Wikipedia homepage and invited users to collaborate. The Wikipedia site made it clear to users that Wikipedia would always be free and that the managers of the site did not claim ownership of the contributed articles. The response has been phenomenal — by 2004, over 255,000 articles had been published in the English version, many of them collaborated on by hundreds of users. Thanks to worldwide excitement about collaborating to build an online wiki, Wikipedia is now available in multiple languages.

Popular Wiki Software Applications

Not all wiki software is the same. Popular wikis applications such as  Wiki, TWiki, PHPWiki, Tikiwiki, Sushi Wiki, and Flex Wiki each possess various strengths and weaknesses and are built for different platforms. Some wiki applications rely on simple wiki tags while others provide Rich Text Editors or support some HTML editors, such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Each day programmers are adding new features to various wikis and different wikis have different programming codes. 

Below is a discussion of three different wiki applications that you may use to author documents: Flex Wiki, Open Wiki, and Sushi Wiki.

 Why Wiki?

Wikis are first and foremost about sharing writing. Most people use wikis not to publish a final document but to make available world wide the opportunity to collaborate with others. Wiki authors generally do not claim personal ownership of texts, but pass them around, make changes, and strive to make the wiki as accurate and informative as possible. Most wikis encourage everyone to participate.

Because wikis provide a new way to collaborate, you may first need to experiment with writing and collaborating in a wiki before you can identify how you might use wikis to achieve academic and professional goals.  In other words, you need to give wikis a little time before judging their usefulness.

Theoretically, wikis are ideal for any writing situation that could benefit from collaboration. On the plus side, wikis are flexible and user-friendly. They offer unparalleled opportunities for collaboration. Yet wikis are not really the tool of choice when you are writing as a single author and do not want to reveal your composing process to readers, unless you really want to get your work online and do not know how to create web pages. If your project requires tight security, or you are only interested in single-authored documents, a wiki is probably not for you.

Below are some examples of when wikis are the preferred tool of choice: 

·         Wikis are good for documents that welcome collaboration from anyone interested in the topic. For example, WritingWiki invites college students to publish their writing with other college students around the world. The Wiki Travel Guide invites anyone to enter information about any destination in the world. Since anyone who visits the site is likely to have special knowledge or tips for travelers to his or her own native area, this wiki has the potential to become an invaluable public resource for travelers.  In turn, if you have expertise in a given area, you could author pages about your specialization in wikipedia. 

 

·         Companies are finding wikis to be an invaluable way to promote collaboration, communal knowledge, and community.  Software developers are particularly fond of wikis because they engage users in trouble shooting and in the co-authorship of user manuals.  Wikis are particularly ideal for group projects in educational settings.

 

·         Students can use wikis as an alternative to keeping paper journals, in place of in-class free writing, as well as for personal use such as targeting a vast audience with their own creative writing.

Overview of the Project

Wikis can be used for just about any rhetorical situation. However, wikis are ideally appropriate for collaborative writing situations.

Diverse Rhetorical Situations

As illustrated by the table below, people use wikis to address a variety of rhetorical situations.

Rhetorical Analysis of Online Readings

Conduct a rhetorical analysis, audience, purpose and media invoked by the following readings.  What do these sample wikis tell you about ways to use wikis? What new approaches can you identify for using wikis?

1. WritingWiki  This wiki invites writers to a free space to share projects, suggestions for composing, and tips for writers.
   
    
2. Wikipedia This online encyclopedia, started in January 2001, now contains over 255,000 entries and is published in several different languages.
   
    
3. Wikibooks A global effort to create a collection of free textbooks in all academic subjects in many different languages.
   
    
4. Wiki Travel Guide This is a comprehensive, free, online travel guide and one of the better examples of appropriate scope and subject matter for wikis.
5. Board Game Wiki A wiki dedicated to board games, board game authorship, and board game lore.
   
    
6. Wikitionary Free online dictionary.
   
    
7. Thesaurus Free online thesaurus.
   
    

Analysis of Key Features

Because wikis are a new authoring tool, conventions for their use are not set in stone.  Developers are constantly exploring a number of key features Wikis are an exciting and experimental new genre of writing:

1.       Wikis democratize the composing process.  While authoring, collaborating, and designing conventions may differ from one wiki to another, in general wikis allow readers to co-author documents, make hyperlinks, and create new pages that are associated with each other.

a.       Most wikis allow anyone to edit pages or create new content.

b.       Wikis track changes so that users can see all revisions made to a document.

c.       Wikis build consensus by encouraging users to speak with a community voice.

 

2. Wikis are public. They are published online from the first rough draft to the final, polished document.
   
    
3. Wikis are dialogic. They tend to begin, as Ward Cunningham and MC Morgan have pointed out, as a statement that develops into a discussion or as a conversation that evolves into an analytical text. Although wiki pages may resemble finished products, they are actually always pieces of ongoing conversation. Much of the discussion about revisions takes place in the “history” page of the document, where users can describe and attempt to justify the changes they make to a page.
   
    
4. Because wikis record every change made to a document, they can emphasize revision. Writers may not carefully polish every page. They may just throw some ideas out there and hope others will develop the ideas.

5. Because most wiki applications (such as Open or FlexWiki) make it somewhat difficult to add visuals, wikis tend to be minimalistic in style.  Just because wikis tend to be more textual than graphic doesn’t mean that the author can ignore the principles of document design.  As even a quick review of wiki pages will show, authors make use of headings, lines, and white space in order to present an uncluttered view of the text.
   
    
6. In fact, some wiki applications allow users to protect pages from being modified by readers. Protecting pages from collaboration conflicts with the spirit of the wiki way and in some ways defeats the purpose. Protecting wiki pages from collaboration could be equated with using a ping pong paddle play racquetball; you can do it, but is the game still accurately called “ping pong?”
   
    

Focus

Wikis that are too tightly focused may not attract as much attention as wikis that are more general and broad in scope. Consider the variety of topics available at Wikipedia. The narrower your focus, the fewer people will feel compelled or qualified enough to participate. A wiki about a particular coin may interest a few people, but a wiki about coin collecting in general will likely encourage wider and more frequent participation. This consideration must be balanced, of course, with your goal in using Wiki.

Wikis are used for diverse situations, so your focus should go hand-in-hand with its purpose:

·         As a dialogic tool, the wiki is loosely formed on inception but becomes more focused as the collaborators come to a better agreement or understanding of the project at hand.

 

·         If you are using the wiki as space for your own comments or insights, or if you prefer wikis to blogs, the focus would then be on advancing your own rhetorical thinking.    

 

·         Many wiki applications make it easy for users to add a summary box to the top of the wiki pages. This summary box reinforces the trend toward providing an overview of the importance of a document.

 

·         It is not uncommon to separate text from discussion space with lines. Use a horizontal line to separate different ideas or to separate discussions about a draft from the actual draft.

 

·        The name of a page is important, as it allows a user to locate it in an index. Try not to name pages with titles like, “Page One,” and so forth. Always ensure that the title gives some indication of the page’s content, such as “Ancient Greek Coins” or “Coin Polishing Techniques.”

Development  

Wiki pages, like other texts, develop in response to a rhetorical situation (see Thinking Rhetorically). For example, if you are writing for TravelWiki, you would want to address the questions your readers want answers to: Is this place worth visiting? Is it hard to get to? Is it expensive, safe, exciting?

 

The best way to ensure proper development of a wiki is to encourage as many people as possible to participate. Feel free to “bite off more than you can chew” when creating a wiki; the idea is that other people with special knowledge will make up the balance. Ideally, your wiki will become a community of authors united by common interest and eager to share their knowledge with others interested in the topic. You might begin by informing your friends about your wiki and asking them to invite others they know who might be interested. Later, once news of your wiki spreads and its pages begin showing up in search engines, other people may find the site and decide they want to contribute. Many popular wikis like Wikipedia and Wiki Travel Guide keep wiki authors motivated by showcasing a “page of the day” to draw attention to stellar work on the wiki.

 

Above all else, your wiki should be easy to navigate and edit. Users who might have valuable contributions to make will quickly give up if asked to use complex codes or search aimlessly through badly organized pages. You should provide plenty of help and outlines to assist those people who would like to participate but lack the specific technical knowledge required to do so.

 

When topics are especially controversial--such as abortion or stem cell research--counterproductive flame wars can undermine development. In such instances, Jimmy Wales, the chief architect behind wikipedia, writes

“I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think…” (Wales)

·In other words, Wales urges authors to overcome base instincts and take the higher ground. The wiki way does not honor authors who delete the words and opinions of others. Yes, separate places in the text can hold competing ideas, yet it is generally impolite to edit another’s words out of existence. Even so, life does get complicated and when someone merely enters text to disrupt the community, then such deletions are necessary. Spam text, for example, must be deleted.

In a collaborative situation, you may start with a comment or a series of questions and then ask others to respond, elaborate, or debate followed up with others’ comments and observations.  This leads to dialogic collaboration.  You may want to set up your wiki page to reflect different conversational threads by using lines to separate individuals’ comments.

 

Some wiki software packages offer a “subscription feature.” This powerful feature notifies authors whenever someone makes a change to pages they have collaborated on. The subscription feature allows authors to monitor their wiki pages, making for a self-governing wiki environment that effectively inhibits those persons who might vandalize or post advertisements on your wiki.

 

Wikis sites can take some time to develop and they typically are collaborative projects.  You would be wise to identify key roles and decide who will assume these roles.  As you work on developing your wiki, members of your creative team will have different ideas about how to present their work online.

Organization 

Wiki organization can be achieved, but it is certainly not the easiest aspect of wiki authoring. You must begin by deciding how you would like each page to look, then providing a template for other wiki authors to follow. Ideally, each page will contain a descriptive title and sub-headings, where applicable.  Some wiki software will allow you to build or use built-in templates automatically, but others will require authors to follow a common template. You may request that all authors refer to a style sheet which describes how you want each page to look and the proper format they should follow.

According to M.C. Morgan, a professor of English who has used wikis in a variety of college classrooms, collaborative wikis tend to be loosely organized in early drafts. Some wiki pages are organized as brief comments that branch off into discussions.  Daily writing and journaling will naturally have entries organized by date.  An annotated bibliography in MLA format will be organized alphabetically by author.  Perhaps the best examples of different organizational schemes can be found in the Wikipedia.

Figure 1. In this screenshot, a standard outline template is used to organize information. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article

Most wiki software allows users to view an alphabetical list of all wiki pages by opening the index page. The usefulness of this feature will depend on how well the authors have named their pages.

Figure 2. In this screenshot, note the use of the Title Index and the importance of labeling pages so readers can identify the likely content of the page. Source: TeachingWiki

Another built-in feature of most wikis is the Table of Contents. Again, the usefulness of this feature will depend on how well your authors have conformed to the template.