Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or wiki application) is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including all current and previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database.
Wiki software was invented and first created by programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995. There are currently dozens of actively-maintained wiki engines, in a variety of programming languages, including both open source and proprietary applications.
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The first wiki application, WikiWikiWeb, was created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham in 1994 and launched on c2.com in 1995.[1] "WikiWikiWeb" was also the name of the wiki that ran on the software, and in the first years of wikis' existence there was no great distinction made between the contents of wikis and the software they ran on, possibly because almost every wiki ran on its own customized software. The WikiWikiWeb software was later renamed "WikiBase".
Over the next 10 years, many more wiki applications were written, in a variety of programming languages. After 2005, there began to be a move toward increasing consolidation and standardization: many less-popular wiki applications were gradually abandoned, and fewer new applications were created. Relatively few of the wiki engines currently in use were created after 2006.
Wiki functionality has also been added to existing content management systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint and Drupal.[2]
There are essentially three types of usage for wiki software: public-facing wikis with a potentially large community of readers and editors, private enterprise wikis for data management by corporations and other organizations, and personal wikis, meant to be used by a single person to manage notes, and usually run on a desktop. Some wiki software is specifically geared for one of the usage types, while other software can be used for all three, but contains functionality, either in its core or through plugins, that help with one or more of the usage types.
Public wikis are wikis that can be read by anyone; usually (though not always), they can be edited by anyone as well, though sometimes registration is required. Among public wikis, MediaWiki is the dominant software: it powers the world's most popular public wiki, Wikipedia, as well as the most popular wiki farm, Wikia, and it is the most popular software in use on other public wikis as well.[3] Other wiki engines used regularly for public wikis include MoinMoin and PmWiki, along with many others.[3]
Enterprise wiki software is software meant to be used in a corporate (or organizational) context,[4] especially to enhance internal knowledge sharing, with a greater emphasis on features like access control, integration with other software, and document management. Most proprietary wiki applications specifically market themselves as enterprise solutions, including Confluence, Socialtext, Jive Engage, SamePage, and Traction TeamPage. In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions, including Foswiki, which calls itself "the free and open source enterprise collaboration platform",[5] and TWiki, which calls itself "the Open Source Enterprise Wiki".[6] Some open-source wiki applications, though they do not specifically bill themselves as enterprise solutions, have marketing materials geared for enterprise users, like Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware[7] and MediaWiki.[8] Many other wiki applications have also been used within enterprises.
Among the many companies and government organizations that use wikis internally are Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Intel, Microsoft and the United States intelligence community.
Within organizations, wikis may either add to or replace centrally-managed content management systems. Their decentralized nature allows them, in principle, to disseminate needed information across an organization more rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository. Wikis can also be used for document management, project management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and many other kinds of data management.
Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include:
Software that is specifically designed for running personal wikis includes NotePub, Pimki and Tomboy. Other, more general, wiki applications have components geared for individual users, including MoinMoin, which offers a "DesktopEdition".[9]
Most wiki software uses a special syntax, known as wiki markup, for users to format the text, instead of requiring them to enter in HTML. Some wiki applications also include a WYSIWYG editor, either instead of or in addition to the wiki markup editing.
There are a variety of wiki hosting services, otherwise known as wiki farms, that host users' wikis on a server. Some wiki software is only available in hosted form: PBworks, Wetpaint and Wikispaces are all examples of wiki hosting services that run on code that is only available on those sites. Other wiki software is available in both hosted and downloadable form, including Confluence, Socialtext, MediaWiki (available on Wikia and EditThis.info, among other sites) and XWiki.
Wiki software can include features that come with traditional content management systems, such as calendars, to-do lists, blogs and discussion forums. All of these can either be stored via versioned wiki pages, or simply be a separate piece of functionality. Software that supports blogs with wiki-style editing and versioning is sometimes known as "bliki" software.
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is an example of wiki software that is designed to support such features at its core. Many of the enterprise wiki applications, such as TWiki, Confluence and SharePoint, also support such features, as do open-source applications like MediaWiki and XWiki, via plugins.[10]
Some wiki applications let users embed scripting-style calls into wiki pages, which are processed by the wiki's parser and run either when the page is saved or when it is displayed. MediaWiki is one example of such an application.[11]
Wiki software can let users store data via the wiki, in a way that can be exported via the Semantic Web, or queried internally within the wiki. A wiki that allows such annotation is known as a semantic wiki. The current best-known semantic wiki software is Semantic MediaWiki, a plugin to MediaWiki.
Some wiki software has special handling for accessing by mobile devices, such as mobile phones. This is usually done by displaying conservative HTML coding.[12][13]
Various approaches to providing wiki functionality when the user is not online have been tried. For users who need to simply read the wiki's content when offline, a copy of the content can often be made easily; in the case of Wikipedia, CD-ROMs and printed versions have been made of parts of Wikipedia's content.
Allowing offline editing, however (where the changes are synchronized when the user is back online), is a much more difficult process. One approach to doing this is using a distributed revision control system as a backend of the wiki, in peer-to-peer stye. With this approach, there is no central store of the wiki's content; instead, every user keeps a complete copy of the wiki locally, and the software handles merging and propagating of changes when they are made. This is the approach taken by the ikiwiki engine (which can use the distributed revision control system Git as its back-end), and Code Co-op (a distributed revision control system that includes a wiki component).
There has also been research done on allowing Wikipedia to be run as a decentralized wiki,[14][15] and on modifying the application XWiki to function in this way.[16]
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