Do your students wiki?

I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF A WIKI LAST YEAR when a student submitted a paper and quoted from the Wikipedia (1), an open access encyclopedia and probably the best known wiki project on the web (2). Being the good faculty member, I immediately went to the website to check on the accuracy and veracity of the quote. What I found was an amazing new world. Wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick. The term was first coined in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, when he designed the Portland Pattern Repository as a community to discuss and share ideas about pattern languages. He called his work a wiki, based upon his exposure to the quick (wiki) shuttle buses used at the Honolulu Airport. Wikipedia (1) defines wiki as a "website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. 'Wiki' also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website." The defining characteristics of a wiki are: social software that allows the ability to edit and add to a wiki document with relative ease; a simplified hypertext markup language for creating documents; and an open editing philosophy in which the community can edit and add to the document. Wikis are part of a group of Internet-based social software that promotes social interactions. According to Wikipedia (1), "social software connects people together intellectually and makes it possible to share and evolve ideas. Social software is not bound just by what features the tool provides, but also by social conventions and etiquette on how to use it appropriately." Lamb (2, p. 48) summarizes the characteristics of social software as "relative simplicity, empowered users and bottom-up organization." I also think the wiki prayer says a lot about its popularity: "Please, grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit, the courage to edit the pages I can, and the wisdom to know the difference" (2, p. 48). So how are wikis being used and why are they important? Perhaps the predominant reason for wiki usage is the ethic of intellectually sharing ideas. Wikis represent the shift of information technology tools from number crunching (automation) to individual productivity (personal computing) to current web-based tools that support social collaboration. In a recent article published online by the Healthcare Marketing and Communications Council (3), blogs, wikis, open publishing, and web syndication are considered the future "platforms and business models that have already profoundly changed the Web, pouring millions of words of new content onto an unsuspecting world." Much of the content, the article states, is "junk and unread, but there are pearls, trusted brands, and business models emerging." The notion of wikis is even being discussed in the British Medical Journal as a future scenario for medical publishing. In an editorial describing the four futures for scientific and medical publishing, Abassi and colleagues describe one scenario: "Publishers have largely disappeared, and communication takes place mainly through global electronic conversations" (4, p. 1472). A letter to the editor reacting to these scenarios acknowledges that the Wikipedia concept could be used to foster a medical publishing community that openly shares and converses in the future. The letter points out that the wiki concept allows for the maintenance of the original article while allowing continuous updating and editing of knowledge. The literature on wikis is quite diverse. I found articles in the fields of higher education, computing, bioinformatics, psychology, and law. The fact that Newsweek (6) had an article on wiki lends support to its rising popularity. Following is a sampling of wiki uses. In higher education, a wiki is an environment that can support communities of learning or communities of practice. As Kurhila (7) states, higher education is not only about transmitting knowledge. …