The wiki- prefix comes from the Hawaiian word wiki, which means quick or fast. Programmer Ward Cunningham first used the term in a software context back in the mid-’90s, when he created a collaborative site called WikiWikiWeb. Since then, we use the word wiki (the Hawaiian is pronounced WEE-kee, but most folks say it as WIK-ee) to refer either to a collaborative Web site that allows users to add to, edit, and delete from the site’s content or to the software that enables such collaboration. Feel free to also use it as a verb or an adjective.
Wikipedia is by far the most famous wiki, but there are thousands of others. LyricWiki (lyricwiki.org) is a wiki for song lyrics; Chainki (en.chainki.org) is a wiki of Web site links; and CookBookWiki (cookbookwiki.com) is a recipe wiki. There’s even a site called WikiIndex (wikiindex.com) that’s a wiki that tracks wikis. In big wikis, this socially produced knowledge works well, but smaller attempts at collaboration often go awry. The Los Angeles Times launched the Wikitorial—reader-generated edits to the day’s editorials—on 19 June 2005 but shut it down just three days later because the site was flooded with profane language and pornographic images.
Wikis are a subset of a larger phenomenon called crowdsourcing, which is a play on outsourcing. Crowdsourcing means obtaining labor, products, or content from people outside the company, particularly from a large group of customers or amateurs who work for little or no pay. With YouTube and its user-made (or user-copied) videos, MySpace and its user-built pages, and iStockPhoto with its user-shot photos, we’re seeing the beginnings of what some are calling the age of the crowd. This crowd comes from all walks of life, but for some, crowdsourcing is a way of life. And by some, I’m speaking, of course, of teenagers. In November 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report saying that 57 percent of online teenagers—some 12 million in all—create something on the Web. The reports called them teen content creators. On a more serious level, some companies crowdsource research and development tasks—usually small jobs called microtasks—to amateur hobbyists, who are called solvers.
The secret to crowdsourcing is the size of the crowd. Wikipedia works because it has tens of thousands of Wikipedians. (Not Wikipedists, which would seem to be the proper analogue to encyclopedist; Wikipedian’s editors are members, so the -ian suffix—meaning “belonging to” or “involved in”—is more appropriate.) The bigger the crowd, the more effective is the social filtering that weeds out the chaff and promotes the wheat. (The Wikipedian sentries managed to beat back the Colbert-inspired hordes that descended upon the site’s elephant page.) A large crowd means lots of eyeballs, a term that echoes open-source guru Eric Raymond’s dictum that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” In the age of the crowd, eyeballs are plentiful.
source: IEEE Spectrum, December 06 Issue
