Wiki 101
by Doug Anger, Technology Columnist

With the unveiling of Lakerpedia, we at the Compass thought it would be a good idea to review the basics of Wikis.

From the Hawaiian word for fast, Wiki is the term used for any website that is easily editable by end users. The first Wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was developed by Ward Cunningham beginning in 1994. Since then, many websites on the Internet have adopted the Wiki in order to encourage user participation. By far the most popular of these is the Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/), a user-editable encyclopedia containing well over a million and a half articles in English alone.

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While Wikis often have the advantages of being updated more quickly and having a much larger selection of qualified editors than any other sources, users must beware that because anyone can edit the content of a page, that content isnt necessarily the most informed or accurate. For this reason, many university professors and school teachers have forbidden the use of Wikis as sources on reports and other assignments. While the Compass does not advocate violating any class policies, there are still ways to use Wikis effectively in research.

Wikipedia policy (and that of most other popular Wikis) requires all information on a Wiki to have a cited source. No original research is allowed on the Wikipedia, hence Wikipedia itself should never be an original source. What it can be is a great resource for finding original sources. You can find references in brackets often followed by a glyph of an arrow pointing outside of a box after whatever fact is being referenced.

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