{"id":115,"date":"2018-06-14T19:04:32","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch07-3\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T15:40:46","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T15:40:46","slug":"ch07-3","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch07-3\/","title":{"raw":"7.3 Wikis","rendered":"7.3 Wikis"},"content":{"raw":"
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Learning Objectives<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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After studying this section you should be able to do the following:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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  1. Know what wikis are and how they are used by corporations and the public at large.<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Understand the technical and social features that drive effective and useful wikis.<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Suggest opportunities where wikis would be useful and consider under what circumstances their use may present risks.<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Recognize how social media such as wikis and blogs can influence a firm\u2019s customers and brand.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    A wiki<\/a><\/span> is a Web site anyone can edit directly within a Web browser (provided the site grants the user edit access). Wikis derive their name from the Hawaiian word for \u201cquick.\u201d Ward Cunningham, the \u201cwiki father\u201d christened this new class of software with the moniker in honor of the wiki-wiki shuttle bus at the Honolulu airport. Wikis can indeed be one of the speediest ways to collaboratively create content online. Many popular online wikis serve as a shared knowledge repository in some domain.<\/p>\r\n

    The largest and most popular wiki is Wikipedia, but there are hundreds of publicly accessible wikis that anyone can participate in. Each attempts to chronicle a world of knowledge within a particular domain, with examples ranging from Wine Wiki for oenophiles to Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki. But wikis can be used for any collaborative effort\u2014from meeting planning to project management. And in addition to the hundreds of public wikis, there are many thousand more that are hidden away behind firewalls, used as proprietary internal tools for organizational collaboration.<\/p>\r\n

    Like blogs, the value of a wiki derives from both technical and social features. The technology<\/em> makes it easy to create, edit, and refine content; learn when content has been changed, how and by whom; and to change content back to a prior state. But it is the social motivations of individuals<\/em> (to make a contribution, to share knowledge) that allow these features to be harnessed. The larger and more active a wiki community, the more likely it is that content will be up-to-date and that errors will be quickly corrected (again, we see the influence of network effects, where products and services with larger user bases become more valuable). Several studies have shown that large community wiki entries are as or more accurate than professional publication counterparts (Lichter, 2009; Kane, et. al., 2009).<\/p>\r\n

    Want to add to or edit a wiki entry? On most sites you just click the \u201cEdit\u201d link. Wikis support what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)<\/a><\/span> editing that, while not as robust as traditional word processors, is still easy enough for most users to grasp without training or knowledge of arcane code or markup language. Users can make changes to existing content and can easily create new pages or articles and link them to other pages in the wiki. Wikis also provide a version history. Click the \u201cHistory\u201d link on Wikipedia, for example, and you can see when edits were made and by whom. This feature allows the community to roll back<\/a><\/span> a wiki to a prior page, in the event that someone accidentally deletes key info, or intentionally defaces a page.<\/p>\r\n

    Vandalism is a problem on Wikipedia, but it\u2019s more of a nuisance than a crisis. A Wired<\/em> article chronicled how Wikipedia\u2019s entry for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was regularly replaced by a photo of a \u201cscruffy, random unshaven man with his left index finger shoved firmly up his nose\u201d (Pink, 2005). Nasty and inappropriate, to be sure, but the Wikipedia editorial community is now so large and so vigilant that most vandalism is caught and corrected within seconds. Watch-lists for the most active targets (say the Web pages of political figures or controversial topics) tip off the community when changes are made. The accounts of vandals can be suspended, and while mischief-makers can log in under another name, most vandals simply become discouraged and move on. It\u2019s as if an army of do-gooders follows a graffiti tagger and immediately repaints any defacement.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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    Wikis<\/h4>\r\n

    As with blogs, a wiki\u2019s features set varies depending on the specific wiki tool chosen, as well as administrator design, but most wikis support the following key features:<\/p>\r\n\r\n