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Contact: Around the Wiki World

Topic A: Consumer-generated media. If 2004 was the year of the blog, some pundits and industry insiders are pointing to wikis as the new "it" media of 2005. Unfortunately, many are completely clueless when it comes to wikis, which are, by their very nature, continuously evolving forms of media. Literally.But what the heck is a wiki, anyway?

The name "wiki" comes from the first wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository, a Web site for computer programmers. The founder, Ward Cunningham, named the site the WikiWikiWeb after the "wiki wiki" buses that serve the Honolulu airport - wiki wiki is Hawaiian for "quick."

The simplest definition of a wiki is a site that collects a number of pages - called wiki pages - which are connected by hyperlinks and can be written and edited using any Web browser. Most wikis are entirely open to the public. That means any visitor can come along and edit an entry, whether or not they've registered with the site.

The open-source format of a wiki allows anyone with some level of expertise on a particular subject to create new pages, or edit and add to old pages. The largest wiki on the Web, Wikipedia, use this format to create an encyclopedia with 470,000 entries in its English edition and 1.3 million articles in all. Wikipedia capitalizes on the appeal of showing off one's encyclopedic knowledge of say, hang gliding, or ancient Greek history, and creates a community of editors who keep an eye on the site and make sure no Web vandals ruin the fun.

Vandals, though, can be a problem. For example, during the writing of this piece, the Wikipedia entry for "Wikipedia" was replaced with "SEX ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Wikipedia, however, keeps a log of all edits and fixes cases of vandalism quickly and easily. Indeed, by the time the piece was completed, an altruistic reader had replaced the vandalized entry with an earlier version.

Wikipedia is by far the largest wiki on the Web, but other sites follow the format developed by Cunningham to create large destinations filled with consumer-generated media. There are about 1,000 public wikis listed at WorldWideWiki.net, which claims to list all known public wikis. Many are highly specialized or geared towards a certain group. Demopedia, for example, is a political encyclopedia written from a progressive viewpoint. Its entry for George W. Bush begins: "(S)elected president of the U.S. between 2000 and 2008. Often referred to as Spawn of Satan&" and contains 168 nicknames for the president, including "Bushitler" and "Smirky McChimpster."

But Wikis aren't merely restricted to encyclopedic collections of public wisdom. Wikimedia, which runs Wikipedia, also runs a site called WikiNews, a free news site that allows readers to edit stories, adding in whatever tidbits they've caught from other sources and creating a story that, potentially, is more complete than the articles it's drawn from. With the amount of free media generated by consumers, people who get paid to generate media might want to polish their resumes. Shankar Gupta

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