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Wiki 
A wiki is a software that allows registered users or anyone to collaboratively create, edit, link, and organize the content of a website, usually for reference material. It is often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The largest wiki World Wide Web today is the English-language Wikipedia. It uses the same MediaWiki software that is also used by this website. Wikis are also used in businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets and for Knowledge Management.
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2. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 to allow users to "comment on and change one another's text," and installed it on the Internet domain, c2.com, on March 25, 1995. He originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work".[1] "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian word for "fast". On March 15, 2007, wiki entered the Oxford English Dictionary Online.
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3. The essence of the Wiki concept are:
- It invites users to edit or create new pages within the wiki website, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
- It 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.
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4. Wikis are designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes. However, the open philosophy of most wikis, allowing anyone to edit content, also means that it cannot ensure that every editor is well-meaning. Vandalism can be a major problem. Wikis, however, tend to take a soft security approach to the problem of vandalism, i.e. making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage. They provide means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages, the most prominent of which, on almost every wiki, is the "Recent Changes" page itemizing recent edits. Larger wikis often employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism. The amount of vandalism a wiki receives depends on how open the wiki is. For instance, some wikis allow unregistered users, identified by their IP addresses, to edit content, whilst others limit this function to just registered users.
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5. For those interested in creating their own wiki, there are publicly available "wiki farms", some of which can also make private, password-protected wikis. Examples include PeanutButterWiki, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and Wikia.. Free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page to generate revenues for the organizers. However, Wikidot, a relatively newcomer, allows contributors to place their own AdSense advertisement units inside their wiki and earn as much as 80% of the revenue accrued. more... at Wikipedia
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