The technology behind Wikinews and Wikipedia now accessible to anyone

Posted by Ulrike Trux on February 18, 2005 at 4:39 PM

The technology behind Wikinews and Wikipedia known as wiki web pages is now open to anyone with internet access. Wikinews allows citizen journalists to report news independently and collaboratively and Wikipedia provides an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. For those that collaborate electronically on professional or personal projects, CNN reports on a recent technology trend that allows anyone to publicly store information through the internet on web pages called Wikis. Rather than continuously working through correspondence by emails attached with differing versions of documents in progress, collaborators can now work on documents and save the changes through the web even without knowing html.
Serial entrepreneur Joe Kraus founded a new Palo Alto based company in California called JotSpot Inc that provides the service of wikis, giving anyone the power to edit a web page. Through a wiki users can find and share commonly worked on documents from any computer with internet access. No information is ever lost amongst users, as revisions are tracked and archived.

Wikis allow collaborators to create online communities through which the users can catch up and trade ideas, images, and work. Another company that provides the service of wikis is called Socialtext. The intended advantage of using a wiki page is to reduce email traffic and save time in group projects.

Source: CNN

Definition of a Wiki from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"A Wiki or wiki (pronounced "wicky", "weekee", or "veekee"; see pronunciation section below) is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. "Wiki" also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website (see Wiki software).

Wiki (with an upper case 'W') and WikiWikiWeb are both used to specifically refer to the Portland Pattern Repository, the first-ever wiki. This usage's proponents suggest a lower-case 'w' for wikis in general. Wiki wiki comes from the Hawaiian term for "quick" or "super-fast". Sometimes wikiwiki or WikiWiki are used instead of wiki. And in Maori language it means weekend and also is a diminutive of Wikitoria, Maori language version of the popular Christian name, Victoria."

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