What Is a Wiki?

In basic terms, a wiki, which means fast in Hawaiian, is a collaborative community website where anybody can contribute. Wikis can be used for a large variety of tasks including creating a knowledge base, assembling an online community, managing a regular site, and much more as new ways to utilize this technology continually expand.

Wikis have several reasons for being so popular… here are five reasons that the Gang at TheeDigital put together.

• Easy to organize as they work as a hypertext database so you can arrange your page any way you like.
• You don’t have to be “techy” as wikis write the HTML for you, so it’s only necessary to learn a few simple markup rules.
• Wikis let you link to pages that don’t even exist yet! Just click on a link that points to a nonexistent page, and just add content. And there you go… you’ve got yourself a page.
• Since a wiki stores everything in an internal hypertext database, it knows about all your links and your pages. Therefore it’s easy for the wiki to show backlinks and a comprehensive list of pages that are linking to the current page.
• It’s extremely easy to edit… if you want to change something on the page, just click the link and the wiki will display an easy-to-use editing screen.

Now, this list only contains five cool things about wikis, but honestly, we could have gone on all day. They really are simple to use and it’s loaded with useful applications. Better yet, you don’t need much to get one started as there is plenty of software available for creating your very own wiki. The bottom line is simple… Wikis are awesome!

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