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A wiki is a website that usually has the following two properties:
(There are exceptions to both rules.)
References:
Here’s how wiki works: People visit the wiki, reading the pages. That’s what you see on the left side of the diagram. When a visitor sees something that’s wrong or needs fixing, they can just go ahead and fix it. Anybody can edit the pages of the wiki. That’s what you see at the bottom of the diagram.
At the bottom of the diagram you also see that each change is recorded. The wiki records the difference between the old and the new revision of the page, and lists the change on a special page, traditionally called RecentChanges. That’s what you see on the right of the diagram. This is where regular visitors check for new recent changes. If they see something they disagree with, they can discuss it, move it, or undo it. That’s how spam is reverted, too.
Not only can existing pages be edited easily, new pages can be added just as easily. Edit an existing page, add a link to a new page, and save. The link to the new page will allow you to edit the new page. Thus, all pages are automatically linked and the web of pages grows organically. At the top of the image you see that this results in a maze of pages, all alike.
It’s just as easy for people to reorganize wikis, too. Create index pages, title pages, sections, categories – if you can write it on a page, anybody can do it.
References:
With a wiki, creating and maintaining a website is trivial: You don’t need to know HTML, nor FTP, nor anything else. This is what people normally use for their websites.
A wiki is great if you want to enable other people to help and contribute. The wiki just helps them to start contributing faster, since it is so easy to use.
A wiki is ideal for a small group of people: classes, friends, project teams, gaming groups. It allows the group members to communicate with each other when you do not or cannot meet each other face-to-face. A wiki also works for chat rooms. Often the logs are available from archives but it is difficult to find good information by searching log files.
A wiki can work as a communication platform and small-scale knowledge-management tool for groups.
If you are storing and searching mostly text, then a wiki is ideal. New pages are easily created, and linking documents to each other is no problem. The barrier-to-entry is low.
If knowledge exists in the form of text, it can be stored in a wiki. Adding new pages, and linking pages is easy, therefore more people can work on collecting and organising knowledge. This is a big boon when knowledge changes all the time or when it is highly interconnected.
Why is the wiki not spammed to death? If there are more good visitors than bad visitors, then there will be more people fixing vandalism than there are people committing vandalism. If your site attracts more vandals than you can handle, however, you might have to lock pages or the entire site or restrict editing powers. See Page Locking and Passwords.
Oddmuse is a wiki engine – a CGI script that runs on some server, and it produces web pages from a page database. The pages can be edited, and the script saves these edits back to the page database. The pages use very simple text formatting rules, so that you do not need to know HTML in order to edit pages. See Text Formatting Rules and What Is Oddmuse.
There are a gazillion other wiki engines. Some use CVS for storage, others use a database, and they exist in nearly every programming language there is.