Editor's note, 11/04: The JOMA Developers' Area Wiki no longer exists, but this article is still a good introduction to wikis.  On page 2, the link to our own wiki has been disabled. In place of the wiki, we encourage you to make use of our "discussion" feature to add your own ideas to our articles and other materials. DAS

You've visited many web sites that are clearly out of date. You know the information is no longer relevant, and you could easily update the information, if only you had permission. Perhaps you take the time to e-mail the webmaster, or perhaps you just move on. You've probably been to other web sites that listed interesting resources. You tried to follow the links but found that they were broken. In some cases, it's as simple as knowing that one company has been acquired by another and that the pages have moved. You could easily add this information to the page but, again, you don't have permission. Finally, you're reading an opinion on a web page, and you'd like to add a comment or even create your own web page and just link to it. Again, you don't have permission.

Daniel Steinberg is Director of Java Offerings for Dim Sum Thinking, Inc.

Should you have permission? Sites such as MAA Online need to present a professional, well thought out image to the public -- they can't afford to let you edit content on their main page. On the other hand, the JOMA Developers' Area can benefit from providing dynamic web pages that allow you to participate in various discussions in meaningful ways. There are other technologies that accomplish this, such as newsgroups and bulletin boards, but wikis are different.

Imagine that you visit a web site where everything can be changed at any time. You can edit the page you're reading to comment on or correct the content. On a long page that has evolved over time, you can summarize portions and tighten it up. You can add a link to a relevant resource to help visitors who want to know more. You can even create your own pages and link them to pages on the site. This is the idea behind a wiki.

Wikis aren't for everyone, but in certain situations they are the perfect solution. In this article you'll get a quick overview of how and when to use a wiki. The Developers' Area in JOMA can benefit from an open community discussion -- we invite you to visit and participate in our wiki, to which we link in the next section.

Initially, wikis are scary. If you can change, add to, or remove content, then so can anyone else. You're not really sure that you trust these other people. We'll consider this issue as well.

Published June, 2002

© 2002 by Daniel Steinberg

Wikis come in lots of flavors. In this article we'll use the JOMA Developers' Area Wiki as our example and point out some of the differences of other wikis. Start by clicking the link in the preceding sentence -- this will open another browser window, and you can alternate between that window and this one. You can navigate around the wiki just as you would any other web site. To follow a link, just click on it as you would on any other site.

When using a web site with many pages, it is often hard to know what has changed since your last visit. In a commercial web site there is often a front page that flags new content. At the top of each page in our wiki, you'll see a link labeled RecentChanges. (In other wikis, this may appear at the bottom and/or have a different name.) If you click on RecentChanges, you'll get a listing from most to least recent of all wiki pages that have changed in the last 30 days. On a web site where visitors can add content, this helps you check to see where people have been making changes. It's usually the first place I visit on a wiki on which I've been active. Our wiki also allows you to view what's changed on a page by clicking on diff, which you will find near the bottom of the page, next to the last revision date. Notice that access to earlier revisions means that you can recover from changes made by malicious users. Other wikis allow you to lock part of the page.

 The following steps will take you through key features of the wiki.

1. Click on MathletDevelopersArea to return to the home page. This link is also at the top of each page. You'll notice that many of the links have a funny appearance. They are words strung together with an uppercase letter at the beginning of each word. This is how you create a new web page. We'll try that in a moment.

    

2. Click on WhatIsThis. An alternative way to navigate to a page is to use the URL. Notice that the URL is http://www.mathdl.org/wiki/MathletDevelopers?WhatIsThis [Ed: This link has been disabled.] The name of the web page follows the question mark. If you know the name of your page, you can just type it after the question mark to navigate directly to the page. The Index also provides you with a listing of the pages, and Search (at the bottom of the page) allows you to search for a page.

    

3. After looking around a bit, try the second navigation method by typing the address http://mathforum.org/wiki/MathForum?HowToUseThis. You're taken to a page -- in a different wiki -- with links that explain how to use a wiki. It's useful to be able to look at these hints while first playing with our wiki.

    

4. Still in the MathForum wiki, open up the page SandBox in a separate browser window. At the bottom of the Sandbox page is a link called Edit text of this page. Click on it. Enter text, and click the Preview button. This is a particularly nice feature of this flavor of wiki. You can see what the page is going to look like before you commit the changes. Experiment with various inputs, and see what they look like.

    

5. Enter the following text: Link back to the HowToUseThis page. Now press the Preview button. You'll notice that HowToUseThis appears as a link. Move your cursor over it and you can see that it navigates to the HowToUseThis page. It's that easy to add hyperlinks within the wiki.

    

6. For external links, try entering the text: Link to the [ MAA home page]. Click on the Preview button and you will see that you've created a hyperlink on the words [MAA home page] that links to .

    

7. For your final trick, you'll create a new page. Enter the text: WikiArticle. Now press the Preview button. This time you should see the text WikiArticle followed by a question mark that is hyperlinked. If you click on that question mark (don't), you are taken to a page similar to the one you are on. You can create the text that will go on this page and press the Save button. At that point, if you returned to the Sandbox, you would see that the text is now WikiArticle without the question mark and WikiArticle is a hyperlink to your newly created page. When you are ready to create a page, that's all there is to it. Just choose a name that follows the naming convention of at least two words joined together, with each word beginning with an uppercase letter followed by lower case letters. For example, if you wanted to create a JOMA page, you could not call it JOMAPage but would have to call it JomaPage. In general, if you decide to create a new page, you should place a link on the new page back to the page you are linking from. This helps to knit your site together and makes your wiki more usable.

 I've been using wikis in the classes that I teach. I set up a simple wiki with a link from the main page to pages for a class roster, syllabus, list of assignments, and topics to discuss in class. The students' first assignment is to add their names to the class roster and then create a link to their own page that they create. I know after this assignment that they understand the basic mechanics of the wiki.

During the first actual programming assignment, the students posted questions about the assignment. Some weren't clear on what was being asked, some weren't clear on grading issues, some had ideas for implementation they wanted to discuss, and some wanted to suggest changes to the requirements for the assignment. Each time I logged on, I would click on RecentChanges, and I could see which pages had changed or been added since I last logged on. I could track and participate in the discussion.

One of the requested changes to the assignment specification struck a chord with the students. I added a survey to the page where I asked them to vote, and I promised that if 12 of the 18 students voted by 5:00 pm the next day we would go with the majority opinion. The voting mechanism was simple. The students edited the page and replaced the current vote with one more in the column that they supported. Of course, I had to trust them. One student could have added 10 to the side he or she supported. In talking to the class afterwards, I found this didn't happen. The vote was honest (14 for, 0 against), and the wiki had allowed me to run this vote without any perl scripts or other programming required.

The technical aspect of setting up your own wiki is not much work. There are perl scripts provided to assist you. You can also use one of the other forms of wiki. For example, the swiki is a Squeak-based wiki. You can find out more about swikis -- to see one in action, visit the Swiki + Comanche site at Georgia Tech.

You can choose to password sites or to leave them wide open. In a way, the less security you put on a site, the less payoff there is to a hacker seeking to do damage.

To see more about creating and running a wiki you can read the book by Bo Leuf and Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham called The Wiki Way (Addison-Wesley, 2001), visit the companion web site, or visit the big wiki. Although The Wiki Way is full of interesting ideas and good advice, the companion CD has formatting errors. You can download the corrected source from the companion (wiki.org) web site. The book also provides insights into how to use wikis effectively.

You should consider the purpose of your wiki and the size of your target audience. This will help you make decisions about whether to require registration, how to bring visitors back when new content is available, whether you're concerned with generating a critical mass of content, and other meta-issues.

Wikis are an ideal setting for supporting focused projects. For example, if you are working on a grant with one or more collaborators, a wiki is a great forum for evolving your proposal. Similarly, you may need to plan a workshop with others who are separated by distance. As different speakers confirm with different organizers, the program can be shaped. You don't have to wait until an overworked webmaster has time to add the latest information. You can edit any page at any time. A small town or other community may want to use a wiki for announcements. You can take a look for announcements on upcoming talks, concerts, pancake breakfasts, etc. If your dog runs away or you are interested in selling your old bicycle, you can just post a notice. In these types of projects, visitors will return because of their interest in the underlying project. If you are running the wiki in support of your class, just the act of posting relevant announcements and responding to student concerns will be enough motivation for regular participation.

For a less focused community, you need to have a site that is initially growing to attract the participation of people who just stop by. This may require that you add up to four pages a day just to give the site a substantial feel. Some wikis support the feature that visitors can register to be notified of changes to a page or to the site. This encourages the community to visit on a regular basis. The wikis at Math Forum (including our Developers' Area Wiki) support registration -- go to Preferences and fill in the first section. By default you will get e-mail notices of changes to the site. Once the wiki is growing, people will come and people will go. Just as with any other resource, as long as it provides value, it will attract visitors.

You have lots of choices when you decide to set up your web site. Why would you choose to set up a wiki? Wikis allow a great deal of interactivity. So do newsgroups and bulletin boards, but these are both organized by time and by topic. You need to know when an item was posted to a newsgroup or you might never find it. You need to look back through a bulletin board to follow a thread. With a wiki, the links are by topic. All of the items that belong on the same page tend to be co-located or can easily be linked. You, or any user, can add links or summarize a page and make it more navigable. In the classroom example above, the first week's assignment page soon grew out of hand. It took a couple of minutes to group all of the posts that had to do with the actual assignment and move them to another page, then to do the same with other identifiable sub-threads. Suddenly the site was more usable. In programming, this practice is known as refactoring.

Before you host a wiki, you've got to make sure that you can "let go." The content may start out being yours, but it can change over time. This is similar to open-sourcing your software. The choices made by the community may not be the same ones that you might have made. From time to time you may have to deal with the occasional badly behaved visitor. People don't have to sign their posts, so it's often not clear who contributed an entry. Anonymity can encourage contributions from community members who would ordinarily be reluctant to participate. Resist your temptation to log and lock everything. The spirit of the wiki is what makes it work.

Finally, before hosting your own wiki, participate in an existing one and see if you like it. We welcome your participation in the JOMA Developers' Area wiki, and we look forward to your signed or unsigned contributions.

Acknowledgment.Thanks to Gene Klotz for his contributions to this article and for his work getting our wiki up and going at the Math Forum. Although it isn't true, I'd like you to believe that any errors in this article are his.