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World of Wikis

By Elizabeth Wasserman

Trying to keep his ancestral history alive, Steve Hargadon, a father of four from Sacramento, Calif. started a family history using wikis this year. Each ancestor has a web page including when they immigrated, whom they married, and medical history notes such as whether they were allergic to penicillin. By putting this information in a wiki, Hargadon's family members can collaborate to add information or change errors even though they may live in different parts of the country.

"It's become a repository for family information that is more than my own personal notes sitting in a drawer," Hargadon says.

The success of Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia, has spawned thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of similar sites. Wikis are now in use in schools, business offices, book clubs, and even families. They are named after a Hawaiian word meaning "quick," according to Wikipedia, and allow users to collaboratively edit articles and resources.

The concept behind wikis is that information that is widely viewed and edited by specialists all over the world is more likely to be up-to-date and accurate. And now there are numerous free wikis sites that anyone can use to create your own wiki, including WikiSpaces, Wet Paint and Peanut Butter Wiki. Before entering the wild world of wikis, here's how you can get the lay of the land first:

Wikis and accuracy
There have been some high-profile cases involving the posting of inaccurate or misleading information on Wikipedia. In the recent political elections, for instance, opposing camps in some hotly contested seats were caught adding controversial information to their opponents' entries. The nature of a community-edited online resource is that it can be manipulated or misused. But now some wikis have monitors to ensure appropriate conduct, and others require users to register with a password. Here's how to verify information on a wiki:

• Check out the history Most wikis track changes to entries. "If someone goes in and puts something in that's false, you have the ability to revert to the prior information," Hargadon says. Wiki visitors can access the history and see if the facts of an entry have been disputed.
• Check out the length If a wiki entry on a topic, such as World War II, is very long and has many links, the odds are that it's been read, vetted and edited by many authorities.
• Check other sources Before letting your children pull information from Wikipedia for a homework assignment, make them verify it with other sources -- which is a good research rule of thumb anyway. "Wikipedia is not the Encyclopedia Britannica and it's not graffiti on a wall. It's in between," says Adam Frey, one of the founders of WikiSpaces. "It must be checked if you're using it for an important purpose."

A variety of types
Frey points out that there are different types of wikis. One category holds itself up as reference materials, such as Wikipedia and some of its sister projects like Wikiquote, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks. There are also academic Wikis on science, such as EvoWiki, or linguistics, such as UniLang. Wikis are also created by communities -- from book clubs to elementary school classes to movie fan clubs. For example, Star Wars aficionados might enjoy Wookiepedia. Scout troops, non-profit groups, churches, and student clubs also use Wikis as a way to plan meetings, draft documents, or discuss issues. To find helpful sites, check out Qwika, a search engine designed to search for wikis.

Ways to contribute
Some general rules apply for contributing to wikis. Most wikis are open to an online "community" (even though some communities are password protected from outsiders) and you're encouraged to contribute. That said, newcomers should tackle small chunks at first, rather than try to restructure everything. "They encourage you to try," says Frey, "but don't be offended when they revert your changes back to the original." In school or business, real world rules or hierarchies might apply when working on a wiki. Some wikis allow you to sign up for automatic notification of changes through Really Simple Syndication (RSS). While most of the new free wiki programs have made contributing to a wiki as easy as writing an email, others may require you to learn a bit of web-page coding.