Navigating
through Internet you come across all sorts of wiki's, pages that allow
you to participate in the confection of the contents, in a great variety
of views and fields. The phenomenon derived from the huge success of
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia of collective elaboration which,
together with Rincondelvago.com is one of the few tools that millions of
people consult about every subject under the sun or even above. Also by
the collective workforce, with great and positive results. There are
also other smaller sites following this philosophy.
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning 'rapid/quick'. Ward Cunningham, creator of the WikiWikiWeb in what seems far gone days of 1994, adopted it after a trip to the Island of Oahu, that of Waikiki, Pearl Harbour and Hanauma Bay, according to Wikipedia itself. It amused him when an employee of the international airport of Honolulu urged him to take the wiki wiki shuttle that linked the terminals. Later the digital genius transformed wiki in what the Americans call brackronym, an acronym created by expanding the letters of a word already exists. So wiki corresponds to the initials of the phrase: 'What I know is'. Bet some of you didn't know that!
Without doubt, the model wiki is an example of democratising knowledge; it has it's But's. On one hand it questions the power of the encysted hierarchy universal knowledge, to me this is good; on the other hand, it makes it evident the necessity of establishing filters of quality so as not to transform this prestigious transcript into endless blunder.
That happened in WikiLingua.net boasting to be 'the biggest encyclopaedia of the world in your language'. Too many examples to list here, mostly about misinformation, or too much unnecessary information or not exactly related information, complained by a number of people writing to the media in Spain. Some of them have nicknamed it Whiskipedia.
Current Mood: 
Accomplished
Accomplished
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