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So what is a Wiki really?
A Wiki Web is an open and collaborative web publishing environment normally edited by a large community of its users. There is often no security in place on a Wiki and anyone can edit any of the content, the idea being to foster and encourage free and open publishing.
A Wiki is a useful means of sharing information, archiving it, integrating disparate but related sources, and communicating with peers or other interested parties, like an organisational memory bank or living book if you like.
The Wiki concept of ease-of-publishing and community authorship is quite close to the original vision Tim Berners-Lee had for the 'Web' when he developed the underlying technologies that now support it. This open publishing is almost totally at odds with typical web pubilshing environments today which are generally closed and/or moderated by small numbers of web owners or managers.
The original Wiki was invented by Ward Cunningham and was then called Wiki Wiki. It was built for the Pattern Languages community to aid in the collaborative creation and documentation of software patterns. To see this Wiki in action, and get more information on Wikis in general go to http://www.c2.com.
Wiki often have a central theme or topic of interest that the community share, although there are more generic Wiki like
WikiPedia
: which cover a much broader range of topics.
The name Wiki Wiki is Hawaiian and means something like "Quickly"
See Also: Wiki Beginners Topics | FAQ