Greetings and Salutations,
I bring to you today the distinguished and educationally criticized and condemned topic of great importance and yet little help to our little crusade, the wiki.
Now, I'm sure all of you have us ed a wiki of one form or another during your life time, for who hasn't? There are so many, whether they are semi serious, like wikipedia, have a nonsense attitude like the Encyclopaedia Dramatica, or even the many that are hilariously serious as in Bulbapedia. You may be asking me at this time (or you could be dosing off and not caring) what exactly is a wiki? How did they start? What makes it different from an encyclopedia or dictionary?
Well, a wiki is, as the inventor of them, Ward Cunningham, once said "[a wiki is] the simplest online database that could possibly work." This means that a wiki is a simple, easily accessible online database, which I will expand on a little and say that it is a simple, generally universally accessible online database, sometimes with foci, sometimes without. This makes Wikis very popular as a method of garnering information quickly.
The first wiki was started by Ward Cunningham, as stated above, in 1994, for software developers. He got the name from the Honolulu airport shuttle transportation system, which uses the Hawaiian term "wiki" meaning fast. Then in 2000 the number of wiki spin offs from the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb, or WardsWeb as it came to be called, dramatically increased. This boom lead to the creation of Wikipedia, which today is the largest and most popular wiki around the globe. Or at least that's what they say, I guess I should warn you that although all of this information was double checked, it was gathered from wikis and double checked on other wikis. I'll explain why this merits a warning in a moment.
There are several things which make a wiki very different from an encyclopedia or a dictionary, but I'll start with what they have in common. Both wikis and encyclopedias/dictionaries are relatively easy to use, hold almost all the information we know, and some that we aren't quite sure about, and are compiled by many different people. The differences come in many many different ways, for example, whereas encyclopedias and dictionaries are generally not based in the web, though there are quite a few nowadays that are, wikis are entirely held within the internet, and because of that they can use more intuitive methods to make searching for specific things easier. Also, wikis hold not only the information we know, but they are updated almost every day, and to get an update on an encyclopedia you have to go out and buy the next edition, which brings us to our next difference, which is that almost all wikis are free, whereas encyclopedias can be very expensive to get almost as much information. Finally, the biggest difference is that whereas encyclopedias are compiled by a large amount of paid professionals, a wiki is written and compiled by everybody. This means that anybody can upload a page for the wiki, as well as edit anybody else's pages, sometimes unlimitedly, sometimes with moderators.
So now that you have a great idea of what a wiki is, and have way more information than you probably ever wanted to know about wikis, but in my opinion one should never do something halfway. There are several major wikis and wiki groups, Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia, and Wikia. Wikipedia, the largest and most popular of all wikis, has over three million articles, over twenty two million pages, and over fourteen million authors. It has almost every topic you could possibly imagine, though sometimes not as specific as some of the other wikis. Uncyclopedia, and its similar project Encyclopaedia Dramatica, are both satirical wikis based around the principle of misinformation and sarcasm for humor, they both unfortunately are very very efficient in being like ninjas and hiding all of their statistics on how many pages etc. each has, if you are able to find it, please send it to our email address which you can find on our "Contact Us" page. One note about both Encyclopedia Dramatica and Uncyclopedia: they can both be very not safe for work at times and caution is advised when using them, do not go surfing them for fun, use at your own risk. Wikia is actually a website that hosts wikis of many different kinds, from Memory Alpha, which is about the Star Trek universe, to Tardis Wiki, which is about Doctor Who, to any video game, movie, or basically any subject period you can imagine. Actually, even Uncyclopedia is hosted by Wikia, though I place it differently, because it is based on a different principle from the rest of the wikis. Wikia has over two million authors spanning over one hundred and fifty thousand different wikis.
Some of the rules laid down by the majority of wikis, not including the satirical ones, are demonstrated by Wikipedia's "five pillars" as they call them: It is an online Encyclopedia, has a neutral point of view, is free content, should be bound together through civil and respectful interactions, and then we get to the painful part for our search right now, it has no firm rules. The satirical websites are even worse about this. I now follow with a side note, if you have actually read this far, please send me an email detailing how you like my posts, I am aware of at least one person who believes my posts are too long and doesn't read them because of it, if you like my style, say that, if not, say that as well. I am trying if you can't tell, to make this a good blog for any readers who happened upon it, and not just to those who are really smart like those we currently have, although I refuse to lessen quality for more readers, I believe I have already been over that it in last Wednesday's post. If you actually read this far comment about the weather in your area below inside of the blog, I can't see it if it is on Google Buzz or Facebook or something else. So the main problem with wikis is the best part about them, since it is open source and anybody can use them and they basically have no rules. This means that we unfortunately cannot add any more rules to our list, besides the master rule, the one that refers to all of the internet and should hopefully be followed, but do to the nature of the internet, usually is not. Rule eleven: If you are not at least a semi mature patient person, stop, get off the internet, and go watch MTV.
And with that, I close. Thanks as usual for listening or not, comment if you desire, or not. The rules are being compiled as it goes and will be ready by the end for the final post. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment or email us at our new address. If you want to make accusations or have any general complaints or see any errors, whether small grammatical errors or large continuity ones, please feel free to let us know.
Farewell and Valedictions,
Eoin Anndra Davis
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