Concept in Definition ABC

Web pages, portals, microsites, blogs, landing pages,... the variety of formats in which information can be published in Internet putting it to provision everyone's really overwhelming. One of the existing formats, although relatively little known by users, is that of the Wiki.

The Wiki format was not born with Wikipedia -although the free encyclopedia has popularized it-, but much earlier as a form of collaborative editing of hypertextual documentation

Wikis allow multiple users to create and edit documents, working together on the content.

Its history dates back to 1995, and it is the invention of Ward Cunningham, who created it to be able to quickly solve problems in the design software (since Cunningham was then working as a computer programmer). That is why to name the solution who created, adopted the Hawaiian word wiki, which means "fast", baptizing it as WikiWiki.

It was shortly after, in 2001, when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger decided to adopt him for the new

draft from encyclopedia free collaborative that they were creating (and that would lead to the current Wikipedia), and that is the one that in the end has given fame to the Format Wiki.

I'm sure that, to this day, if we go out and ask a hundred people where the Wiki name comes from, no more than one or two will know that it predated Wikipedia, the other vast majority believing that the format got its name from the encyclopedia.

In a similar way to HTML, the Wiki format uses a series of "marks" to separate logical sections. in the text, format, create links or tables, although they are not marks that open and close in many cases

Although we might be tempted to talk about "Wikis" referring, for example, to the different pages that make up the Wikipedia, the truth is that the Wiki is considered as a unit, regardless of the number of articles or pages that this contain.

In addition to Wikipedia, there are other sites that work with the Wiki format and, even and in the same way that happens with content managers, it is possible to install software for it. maintenance from Wikis on its own server.

Its usefulness for maintaining structured and related information has made the Wiki format ideal for preparation of help manuals and databases that need to have a certain freedom in the content of each Article

Among the advantages that a Wiki offers over other formats, without a doubt the one that stands out the most is the possibility of editing a document collaboratively, setting -according to the software and the project policies- reviewers so that the content is approved or rectified.

Photos: Fotolia - tovovan / shendart

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