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A Wiki Wiki World

It may come as a shock, but it's true: We live in a world where a lot of people think they're experts. Unfortunately, much of that expertise goes untapped.

Thanks to wikiHow, the Web's largest how-to manual, you no longer have to keep this expert info to yourself.

So you think you know the best way to cut a coconut, change a tire, or mount a plasma TV? You can use a "wiki" to put this wisdom to work.

"A wiki what?" you ask?

In Hawaiian, "wiki" means "quick," but on the Internet, a wiki is a collaborative Web site where anyone can create, read, edit, and add to the site's contents. They're set up so all you have to do is point, click, and type your advice into a ready-made template. Before you know it, 10, 20, or even 100 people may be fine-tuning your good advice.

"wikiHow is completely open to editing by anyone at all, 24 hours a day," says Jack Herrick, cofounder of the site, which contains more than 6,000 reader-penned "how to" articles.

Every hour, thousands of changes are made to Wikipedia, a wiki-powered free encyclopedia with more than one million English language users.

So what happens if someone's edit is less than expert? The more people involved in the creation of a page, the quicker errors, ads, and graffiti-type material are edited out. The theory is that the more users contribute, the closer the entry will get to the ultimate truth . . . whatever that may be.

Since the wiki technology was developed in 1995, wikis have popped up all over the Internet, turning static pages into interactive forums for news, recipes, travel tips, and even for private use. Web hosts called "wiki farms" also allow users to create private wiki sites for collaborative communication in the workplace.

The result? You finally have a receptacle for all your genius, and your friends have a way of quietly improving on your ideas without having to interrupt you midsentence.

Of course, first you might need to make your own wiki. How do you do that? There's only one place to go to find out.

 

Posted on April 24, 2006