Wiki ecosystem

The wiki ecosystem represents the culture of using wikis to collaboratively develop content and context for small and large groups on many topics both specific and general. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham and friends toward the end of the Twentieth Century. Since then, the use of wikis has catalyzed the development of large bodies of Internet content through massive collaboration and self-organization within communities of interest and practice.

From Wiki: Ward Cunningham and co-author Bo Leuf, in their book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, described the essence of the Wiki concept as follows:


 * A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
 * Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
 * A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser. A single page in a wiki website is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks, is "the wiki". A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.

In the context of wiki culture as an ecosystem, Wikipedia represents a milestone result of the Open Source Movement toward what is needed to bring us together and coalesce efforts toward the common good. Wikipedia was built (and continuously improved) using an advanced wiki software called MediaWiki which, by the way, is also the software upon which the Wikiversity is being built. (See the very bottom of this page) Other wiki engines include ''... list goes here''