WIKING: a new type of virtual communication based on collaboration

HELLO EVERYBODY!!


We have just made another exiting virtual journey on the Web by exploring the wikisphere. But what’s a wiki? What are the most significant characteristics of this web genre? And what are the purposes and benefits of wikis? I will try to answer briefly to these questions and above all I will focus on the striking features of wikis.

A wiki is a type of website devoted to collaborative writing. It is a place where contributors have almost equal opportunities: they can EASILY enter, write what they think and know, add or remove some information or correct what other people have previously edited. Moreover, a wiki is a never-ending project! This type of website fosters people’s collaboration in order to achieve a common goal. A wiki is an easy editable website because you don’t need to know HTML: you write your content by means of a simple markup language by using a web browser. Moreover, another feature that distinguishes wikis from online chats or forums, is that you can contribute to the wiki without a preliminary registration. However, you can also find some private wikis on the Web, which require users authentification to edit something.

A wiki is a hypertext medium which is made up of many pages, it provides no-linear navigation because it contains a great deal of hyperlinks to other pages. This type of website also provides some tools which are useful for monitoring the constantly changing state of wiki. Furthermore, there is a place where contributors can discuss and resolve some disagreements which might arise over wiki content.

As far as the language is concerned contributors use a simple language often made up of short sentences. The audience consists of people from all over the world and for this reason the language should be simple and comprehensible. However, sometimes you can also find a formal register: this depends on the author and the subject of the article. Wikis are available in a large number of foreign languages. This makes it possible for different people from all over the world to collaborate for the achievement of a shared goal. If there are many users, the online wiki community benefits more.

The most significant example of a wiki is WIKIPEDIA. It is an online encyclopedia, one of the net’s most popular reference sites. Everything which is written on Wikipedia has been written by an online community; its entries are freely editable and you don’t need a registration to publish on it.

VANDALISM AND COLLABORATIVE PRINCIPLES

As we have previously seen the open philosophy of public wikis enables everyone to edit on them without any registration. But if a lot of people find this feature exiting at the same time other users, who are not well intentioned, might use the wiki to commit vandalism. However, since the wiki’ s online community is very large, contributors pick them out and correct any errors.

It is advisable that all wikis’ contributors follow some common rules in order to create a productive collaborative environment. On wikipedia you can find a link to Policies and Guidelines which users should follow for the achievement of the common goal; moreover, on the "wikiquette" page there are a series of principles which Wikipedia and wiki contributors in general should keep in mind and follow in order to behave and interact appropriately with other wiki users.

Some important principles included on wikiquette are:

- be polite and civil
- remember that wiki users come from all over the world
- be careful of the words that you choose
- respect the views and opinion of all wiki members
- work toward agreement
- be prepared to apologize
- don’t ignore questions
- help to mediate disagreements between others


After having briefly analysed the striking features of this quite new web genre, I think that wiki-ing helps wiki users to become more collaborative and flexible. It fosters the creation of an online community; each member brings benefits to the others and helps the whole community achieve of a common goal. I would like to suggest some wikis that I visited and found interesting:

-Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia editable by anyone
-Wikinews: free news that you can write
-Wiktionary: you can collaborate to write a multilingual dictionary

That all for the moment, enjoy your trip in the wikisphere too!!!

If you have any comments please don’t hesitate to write to me!
Bye bye

Francesca