The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are readers, authors, wiki administrators and system administrators. Some wikis use flat file databases to store page content, while others use a relational database, as indexed database access is faster on large wikis, particularly for searching. HyperCard, however, was single-user, and Cunningham was inspired to build upon the ideas of Vannevar Bush, the inventor of hypertext, by allowing users to “comment on and change one another’s text”.

Such a wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people and places. The term city wiki is sometimes also used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. A city wiki or local wiki is a wiki used as a knowledge base and social network for a specific geographical locale. In academic contexts, wikis have also been used as project collaboration and research support systems.
It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic royaldogs casino bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia’s first edition.

History

The range of quality classes begins with “Stub” (very short pages), followed by “Start”, “C” and “B” (in increasing order of quality). The study identified the most disputed entries on the English Wikipedia as George W. Bush, anarchism, Muhammad, list of WWE personnel, global warming, circumcision, United States, Jesus, race and intelligence, and Christianity. In contrast, articles on other languages’ Wikipedias often focus on regional issues.

Wikipedia’s sister projects

Wikis may allow any person on the web to edit their content without having to register an account on the site first (anonymous editing), or require registration as a condition of participation. Some wikis also implement patrolled revisions, in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark edits as being legitimate. A person willing to maintain pages will be alerted of modifications to them, allowing them to verify the validity of new editions quickly. System administrators are responsible for the installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. Wikis can also be created on wiki hosting services (also known as wiki farms), where the server-side software is implemented by the wiki farm owner, and may do so at no charge in exchange for advertisements being displayed on the wiki’s pages. On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

Contents

WikiNode networks act as webrings which may be navigated from one node to another to find a wiki which addresses a specific subject. Adding categories or tags to a page makes it easier for other users to find it. Wiki implementations can provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages, such as a backlink feature which displays all pages that link to a given page. Users may also create indexes or table of contents pages, hierarchical categorization via a taxonomy, or other forms of ad hoc content organization.
The edit history view in many wiki implementations will include edit summaries written by users when submitting changes to a page. The list displays metadata for each revision to the page, such as the time and date of when it was stored, and the name of the person who created it, alongside a link to view that specific revision. Disagreements between users over the content or appearance of pages may cause edit wars, where competing users repetitively change a page back to a version that they favor. Critics of publicly editable wikis argue that they could be easily tampered with by malicious individuals, or even by well-meaning but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content. On implementations where an administrator is able to restrict editing of a page or group of pages to a specific group of users, they may have the option to prevent anonymous editing while allowing it for registered users. Some wikis can filter the list to remove edits flagged by users as “minor” and automated edits.
Some companies use wikis as their collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning. In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Such links are usually differentiated visually in some fashion, such as being colored red instead of the default blue, which was the case in the original WikiWikiWeb, or by appearing as a question mark next to the linked words. This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.
In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example Kingdom of France. To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained free links (called wikilinks), wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. For example, “Kingdom of France” as a page title would be written as “KingdomOfFrance”, and displayed as “Kingdom Of France”. Beginning with WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used camel case to name pages, which is when words in a phrase are capitalized and the spaces between them removed. The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations.
Most wikis allow the titles of pages to be searched amongst, and some offer full text search of all stored content. This allows authors to revert a page to an older version to rectify a mistake, or counteract a malicious or inappropriate edit to its content. This is generated and submitted to the server transparently, shielding users from the technical detail of markup editing and making it easier for them to change the content of pages. While wiki engines have traditionally offered source editing to users, as early as 2013, some implementations have added a rich text editing mode. There are hundreds of thousands of wikis in use, both public and private, including wikis functioning as knowledge management resources, note-taking tools, community websites, and intranets. A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.

Traditionally, wikis offer free navigation between their pages via hypertext links in page text, rather than requiring users to follow a formal or structured navigation scheme. These stores are typically presented for each page in a list, called a “log” or “edit history”, available from the page via a link in the interface. Some wikis present users with an edit button or link on the page being viewed. Wikipedia is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, with each one pertaining to a specific language, making it the largest reference work of all time.