How does wiki work

Practically, we also think that wikis are a good tool to use because access and editing can be controlled by the instructor thus making a wiki public or private.

Additionally, wikis are accessible online and include user friendly features that require little training. There are a variety of free and easy to use wikis that make it quick and easy to get started using wikis.

For example, try starting with:. Each of these options has example wikis that you can view to get an idea of the possibilities the tool. A common concern among instructors new to wikis as with blogs!

We suggest that before implementing a wiki project in your course, you develop a rubric and explain to students how you will be evaluating their contributions to the wiki. Take a look at some of the existing wiki rubrics, like this one or this one , and adapt it to fit your needs. As with other types of assignments and projects, the more clear you are with your expectations, the more likely students will be able to meet them. The difference between a wiki and a blog is that wikis are designed for collaboration among groups of users.

Anyone with the shared wiki password can edit the content on a wiki at any time. Wikis also provide discussion boards for every page, enabling users to engage in ongoing conversations about their developing project. So how do you choose? For instance, are you wanting your students to write collaboratively or do you want submissions by a single author? For the former use a wiki, and the latter a blog. The possibilities for using wikis to engage students both inside and outside of the classroom are immense.

Wikis Print Version Wikis A wiki is a collaborative tool that allows students to contribute and modify one or more pages of course related materials. Some common uses include: Mini research projects in which the wiki serves as documentation of student work Collaborative annotated bibliographies where students add summaries and critiques about course-related readings Compiling a manual or glossary of useful terms or concepts related to the course, or even a guide to a major course concept Maintaining a collection of links where the instructor and students can post, comment, group or classify links relevant to the course Building an online repository of course documents where instructors and students can post relevant documents Creating e-portfolios of student work Wikis work best when individual authorship is less important than the outcome that is created.

Curious about how other instructors are using wikis? See more about his wiki use here. Lou Rossi, Professor at the University of Delaware, used wikis in his Calculus undergraduate course and his Applied Mathematics graduate course.

Using a wiki helps students spend time on solving problems outside of the classroom in a motivating collaborative environment. Publishing in a wiki gets students aware of the fact that they are writing for an audience, which usually results in using common mathematical language and formulas instead of plain English. Hear more about his work on this podcast. Columbia University Lecturer Jutta Schmiers-Heller created two separate wikis one in the fall semester and one in the spring semester to help the same set of Intermediate I German language students practice and recycle vocabulary and grammar, and learn culture in a fun, interactive way.

Both wikis were embedded in the course curriculum and used for specific projects. The WikiWikiWeb still exists. Because Wikipedia is the largest and most popular wiki on the planet, we will use it as an example to understand how wikis work in practice. If you go to Wikipedia. Type "wing warping" into the search box, and you will arrive at a typical Wikipedia article. The "Wing warping" page offers a brief description of wing warping, links to several related articles inside Wikipedia and several external links.

This is normal for any wiki -- a wiki is nothing but a collection of Web pages interconnected with each other through internal links. In Wikipedia, there are more than a million pages like this in the English version. If you read the article, you will find that it is a useful source of information. It simply tells you what wing warping is and directs you to other resources. Despite the fact that anyone can edit the page even you , there is no pornography, profanity or Nazi slogans on the page.

All the material is completely on-topic. Now we can ask the key question when it comes to Wikis -- where did this page on wing warping come from? Who wrote it? With any "normal" encyclopedia, the answer to that question is simple -- the encyclopedia paid someone to write the article. With Wikipedia, the answer to that question is completely different.

At the top of the "Wing warping" page in Wikipedia, you see a tab that says, "Edit this page. If you have something to say about wing warping that you feel should be on the page, or if you have an external link that you believe would be helpful to other readers who are reading about wing warping, or if you're compelled to write something completely unrelated, then you can add whatever you have to say to the page.

Simply click on the "Edit this page" tab and type away. To many people who have never spent any time with an active wiki before, that last sentence is uncomfortable. The idea that anyone can come to Wikipedia and edit any page at any time and do so with complete anonymity is extremely disconcerting. Obvious questions arise immediately:. The key thing that makes a wiki work is its community.

Using a variety of tools, the community sees to it that vandals, dummies and spammers do not corrupt the encyclopedia. When you edit Wikipedia, you do so using something called "Wikitext. For special features like headings, lists, italics, etc.

To learn the symbols, looked at the page on editing. The heart of any wiki is its community. Literally millions of people visit Wikipedia every month, and together they form Wikipedia's community. Each person who arrives is able to play one or more roles on the site.

For example:. Writers, editors and admins work together to solve almost all of the problems that you would expect to arise in an open platform like Wikipedia. They also work collaboratively create some really well-written and in-depth articles. The best way to understand how the community works is to add something to Wikipedia and see what happens. Here is an experiment for you to try:.

What will happen is that the Wikipedia community will react to your change in some way. If the community has no problem with what you wrote, then your change may still be there completely unaltered one day later.

If what you entered was wrong or vandalistic, you will find that it has been removed. If you make a typo or two try it , chances are that someone will come along and fix your typos. If you format your entries incorrectly or speak in the wrong voice, someone will edit your addition. In other words, your change will be either accepted, altered or rejected by the community.

In that way, pages on Wikipedia are expanding and changing all the time. How did the community know that you made the change? There are several tools available in most wikis that help the community to see what is changing. Community Tools After making your change, look up at the tabs at the top of the article and click "History. In other words, each page in Wikipedia has a revision history that anyone can see. A list of all changed pages is also compiled on a Recent Changes page.

Anyone can go to this page at any time to see all of the pages that are changing in Wikipedia. On a big wiki like Wikipedia, the recent changes page is impressive. Thousands of pages change every day. During peak hours, there can be 50 or more pages changing every minute. Therefore, Wikipedia has a more personal tool called a watchlist.

Here's how it works:. Let's say that you create a new article topic on Wikipedia, or you make some additions and modifications to an article. Once you do that, chances are that you have a certain attachment to the page -- a certain interest in it -- and you would like to know when other people change the page.

By adding that page to your watchlist, you will get notified every time that page changes. Now you can see why a change that you make will not go unnoticed for very long. After you make the change, many people in the Wikipedia community will see what you have done. Some of them may have a strong attachment to the page that you have changed. The first part is provided for you.

To avoid potential problems with updating or modifying the site, do not enter any of the following special characters as part of the Web address. In the Template Selection section, click the Collaboration tab if it is not already selected, and then click the Wiki Site template.

In the Permissions section, select whether you want to provide access to the same users who have access to this parent site or to a unique set of users. If you click Use Unique Permissions , you can set up permissions later after you finish entering information on the current page. In the Navigation Inheritance section, specify whether you want the site to inherit its top link bar from the parent site or to have its own set of links on the top link bar.

This setting also affects whether the new site appears as part of the breadcrumb navigation of the parent site. When you navigate down the site hierarchy, breadcrumb navigation appears on the page to which you have navigated.

If you click No , your subsite will not appear in the breadcrumb navigation for the parent site and the breadcrumb navigation for your new site will not include the parent site.

If you specified that you want the subsite to have the same permission as its parent site, the new site is created when you click Create. If you specified unique permissions, the Set Up Groups for this Site page appears, where you can set up groups for the subsite.

If the Set Up Groups for this Site page appears, you need to specify whether you want to create new groups or use existing groups for visitors, members, and owners of this site.

In each section, do one of the following:. If you click Create a new group , either accept the automatically created name for the new SharePoint group, or type a new name, and then add the people whom you want. Click the check mark icon to verify any names that you type, or click the Address Book icon to browse through your directory for more names. In the Visitors to this Site section, you can also add all authenticated users to the Visitors group, which provides the group members with permission to read the content on your site, by default.

If you click Use an existing group , select the SharePoint group that you want from the list. If you have several SharePoint groups, the list may be abbreviated.

Click More to see the full list or Less to abbreviate the list. When you first create a wiki site, the home page contains sample content about wikis.

Use the buttons on the Formatting toolbar to format text, and add other content, such as images, tables, and hyperlinks. Note: If you are not using a browser that supports ActiveX Controls, you will not see the Formatting toolbar. Instead, you can enter text using HTML tags. Find more information about using enhanced text boxes in the See Also section.

To add wiki links to other pages in your wiki, type the name of the page surrounded by double square brackets: [[Page Name]]. For example, to add a wiki link to a page named "Orientation Information," type: [[Orientation Information]]. To add an image to a wiki, you need to first upload it to your site.

You can upload an image to your site by using a picture library. Find links to more information about creating libraries and adding files to them in the See Also section. Right-click the picture, and then click Copy Shortcut to copy the Web address for the image. Click where you want to insert the picture, and then on the formatting toolbar for the wiki page, click the Insert Image button.

In the Address box, paste the Web address for the image that you copied earlier. For example, if your team will be creating a link later for Training Issues, you can go ahead and insert the link to the page now. The link to a future page appears with a dotted line under it.

To create the page later, someone can click the underlined placeholder link, add content, and then click Create. Type the name of the page, surrounded by double square brackets: [[Page Name]]. For example, to insert a link to a page called "Training Issues," type [[Training Issues]]. The link will be created when you save the page. Tip: To quickly add a link from a wiki page back to the home page for your wiki, type [[Home]].

You can add other items to a wiki site, such as a tasks list to track action items or tasks related to the wiki. You can choose whether or not the list or library appears on the Quick Launch for the wiki. Click the name of the list or library that you want to create, such as Tasks.

In the Description box, type a description of the purpose of the list or library. To add a link to this list or library on the Quick Launch, verify that Yes is selected in the Navigation section.

A wiki can help your organization collect and capture institutional knowledge, assemble content from numerous sources, and share plans and ideas. For example, a corporation can create a company-wide Enterprise wiki where employees can find and contribute the latest, most comprehensive information about corporate activities, benefits, and services. Or your team can use a wiki to collect information for new team members, to plan a conference, or to collect ideas for a large document or manual.

After someone creates a wiki page, another team member can add more content, edit the content, or add supporting links. The community of authors helps to ensure the accuracy and relevance of the content. Wikis continue to evolve as people add and revise information. Because team members can edit wiki pages without any special editing tools, wikis are a good tool for sharing ideas and collecting information from several people.

Team members can easily create links to pages for someone to finish creating later, or links to existing pages, without having to struggle with long web addresses. The default page type on team sites, and other types of sites, is a wiki page.

So in that sense, wiki is everywhere. Because the home page of a team site and the new pages that you create there are automatically wiki pages, you can create a wiki right on your team site without creating other libraries or sites. New pages are created in the Site Pages library on a team site and you can manage your pages from there.

However, the disadvantage to this approach is that you will not have as many specialized options that come with a wiki page library or an Enterprise wiki site. If you know you will be creating many wiki pages or if you want to manage permissions separately for your wiki than for the rest of your site, you have a couple of options, depending on the scale of the wiki you plan to create and the range of options you want:.

Wiki page library A wiki page library is tailored to managing wiki pages and includes special commands on the ribbon for managing page history, permissions, and incoming links to pages. A site owner can create a wiki page library on most sites and get many of the benefits of a traditional wiki. Enterprise wiki An Enterprise wiki is a publishing site for sharing and updating large volumes of information across an enterprise.

If an organization needs a large, centralized knowledge repository that is designed to both store and share information on an enterprise-wide scale, consider using an Enterprise wiki. To learn more information about how to plan and create an Enterprise wiki site, we recommend reading the articles about planning sites and site collections.

You need to have permission to create a site, library, or pages. But the good news is, if a site has been shared with you and you have permission to edit it, you most likely have permission to create a wiki. Permission levels can be customized, but for most sites, you can create a wiki page library if you have the Edit permission level.

By default, members of the Site Name Members group have the Edit permission level. You need to have the Full Control permission level to create an Enterprise wiki site, or your administrator must enable self-service site creation. By default, members of the Site Name Owners group have the Full Control permission level, but your site may be set up differently.

To manage permissions for a page in a wiki page library or an Enterprise wiki, a site owner can click the Page Permissions command on the Page tab on the ribbon. Although initially creating the site or library is similar to other sites, adding content to a wiki is different from how you add content to other types of sites. On a wiki, you usually start by editing the home page and adding placeholder wiki links to other pages that do not exist yet.

You can create those other pages as you go or create them later. When you want to create the page that corresponds to a placeholder link, click the link.

The page opens in Edit mode where you can add text and other content such as images. Was this article helpful? If so, please let us know at the bottom of this page. If it wasn't helpful, let us know what was confusing or missing. Please be as specific as possible, and include your version of SharePoint, OS, and browser. We'll use your feedback to double-check the steps, fix errors, and update this article.

Create a wiki page library A team site is a wiki. SharePoint Server Notes: You can configure the settings for the wiki page library, such as permissions, page history, and incoming links, by going to the library and clicking Page in the header.

To insert a picture from your computer, do the following: Click the Picture and then click From Computer. To insert a picture from a web address, do the following: Click Picture and then click From Address. In the Address box, enter the web address where the picture is located. Top of Page. Click Try link to test your link URL.

When you're done, save your link. Click where you want to insert a wiki link. Do one of the following: To select one of the suggested pages, use the arrow keys and then press ENTER, or use the mouse. Your finished page name should be surrounded by double square brackets, like this: [[Page Name]] Tips: To quickly add a link from a wiki page back to the home page for your wiki, type [[Home]].

Here are some examples of links: [[Dogs]] : A link to a page named Dogs in the same folder. Go to the page that has the placeholder link.

Click the placeholder wiki link. In the Add a page window, click Create. Add the content that you want to the new page and save it. Do one of the following: To edit the path of the link so that it points to a different page, click between the two sets of double-square brackets [[ and ]] , and then replace the current link with the name of the page that you want to link to. You can add a hyperlink to a page that is external to your wiki or even external to your site.

Add a link to an external page If you are not already editing the wiki page, click Edit.