Analysing Wikis....

Hi everybody!!

Here I am in order to complete one of my English course's activities. This week I have to explore the world of wikis, in particular concerning Wikipedia, the most famous example of "wiki", (you can see a picture of its logo, taken from Google).

Reading the various explanations about wikis and listening to an online video course presented by the University of Wisconsin, I tried to understand something more about this kind of software and about the way it is structured.

First of all, a wiki is a tool for collaborative authoring; as a matter of fact, anyone can write some information about a particular subject . Then, this document can be edited inside the website without requiring users to know HTML. A wiki's most important characteristic is that pages can be easily created and modified by anyone!

Unfortunately, this characteristic is also a negative aspect; the fact that anyone can edit a document can be dangerous: wiki content can sometimes be misleading! In order to limit this problem, the software provides users....Wikiquette! What is it?? Wikiquette offers some principles of etiquette on how to work with others on wikis!

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, we can see that each language structures the whole website in different ways. The English version's main page, for example, presents a list of the various subjects at the top where you can click and enter a specific page in wikipedia dedicated to that subject (i.e. clicking on "history" you can find all the documents about this matter, from the etimology of the word to the latest news). At the centre there are the most interesting articles and images of the day. On the left you can read the most recent news and on the right there is generally (as in all the other languages) the "SEARCH" part where you can write what you need and then the software will go through all its documents in order to give you the results you are looking for.

Exploring this technology I realized that the language is simple, often made up of short sentences. I expected this language feature because the audience is very very wide: everyone can use a wiki and for this reason documents have to be understandable to all kinds of users.

However, it does depend on the subject and author (i.e. if a scholar in physics wants to write an article using technical language...then only students in physics will understand that page!).

Wikis, in particular Wikipedia, are full of hyperlinks for each subject, so that users can click on what they are searching for and the resulting website is at their disposal at once!

Surfing the Net, I explored other kinds of wikis and I found the following: Wiktionary (a collaborative project producing a free, multilingual dictionary), Wikibooks (a collection of free content textbooks), and many other examples such as Wikiversity, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikispecies. I noticed that all these kinds of wikis are structured in the same way. The main purpose of each one is: simplicity and clarity!

Well, I hope you've read my attempt to analyse this software and found it interesting!

Bye bye

Giorgia