What Wiki?
August 8, 2008
A wiki is a web page which users can change.
The idea of wiki originated in 1995 when Ward Cunningham realized that posting notes to a listserv (essentially a thread of emails) made it difficult to connect new postings to older ones at the bottom of the list. He envisioned contribuors being able to edit a common document with an archiving of all changes so that a permanent record of the document’s history would exist. The result was the WikiWikiWeb project.
The word Wiki is Hawaiian and comes from the name of a shuttle bus at the Honolulu airport. Wik wiki means “quickly”.
- Photo by Arik Baratz
For educators an understanding of the wiki and its applications have been overshadowed by Wikipedia. As Mark Phillipson1 points out there are different types of wiki as well as corresponding software choices and so Wikipedia may not be the best example to consider.
Phillipson suggests that most teachers are looking for specific examples of wiki-enabled activities for the classroom. In his article he offers a taxonomy of wiki types with examples of their application in teaching.
The five wiki types are:
