Beyond Email The Participatory Web
By Duncan Drury
The World Wide Web is not just a place to check your email and
read the news. A growing number of web sites allow you to become a producer of
information as well as a consumer.
The Wiki Wiki Web
Blogging, the art of keeping a public diary online is all very well for the
narcissists out there, but not everyone wants to keep the rest of the world
updated with the little things that make their lives so well boring. For those
whose egos dont overflow quite so much, or feel they have something more
constructive to contribute to the community at large there are sites like
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) that enable anyone who can type and surf the web
to create their own content.
The founders of Wikipedia have the grand aim of building a peoples
encyclopaedia online. Or rather, they have set up the means for anyone to
contribute to the project. That is right anyone even you! Every page on
Wikipedia has a link labelled edit. Click on this and you can change any text
on the page. You can create new pages. You can even delete what someone else has
written. The Wiki system is very simple if you can write an email then you can
edit a Wiki site.
It sounds completely crazy. Surely some vandal could come in and delete all the
pages. Surprisingly this is a very rare occurrence, and one the builders of Wiki
systems sites such as Wikipedia are built on have created protections against.
Wikis work because people want them to.
But back to Wikipedia. Like a printed encyclopedia, the site is organised into
distinct sections such as Culture, Geography, Science and Technology. Each
section is broken down into subcategories to help you find the information you
need. You can also search alphabetically. The site holds 358,305 articles as of
writing this article. The articles cover almost anything you care to name. And
for those things that it doesnt cover, read on
Sticking your oar in
Unlike other encyclopaedia sites out there, if you find something that is wrong
or you disagree with you can immediately click the edit button and correct the
page or add a comment. If a subject isnt covered you can take the opportunity
to create a new page and add what you know about it. Because of the constant
updating of entries and their democratic nature, Wikipedia has become one of the
most trusted sources of information on the web.
There is even a Swahili version of Wikipedia at sw.wikipedia.org, although this
doesnt have nearly as many entries as the English language version it is
crying out for Tanzanians to start adding entries relevant to them.
The people who made Wikipedia have set up a number of other useful reference
sites, all of which allow you to correct errors and add new entries. Choose from
Wiktionary - a collection of online dictionaries and thesauruses in a number of
languages (no Swahili yet!); Wikibooks a collection of free textbooks and
manuals which may come in very hand for cash strapped students; Wikiquote an
online collection of quotations from the famous and infamous; and Wikisource a
project to make public domain texts available freely.
You are invited to join any of these projects, all of which aim to increase
their non-English sections.
Other Wikis
Wikipedia and its relatives are not the only Wikis out there. The technology
behind Wiki which makes it so easy to set up collaborative web sites has been
embraced by many groups. Other interesting Wikis include Disinfopedia, a site
discussing politics and news; FotoWiki a site of contributed photographs; and
AgWiki agricultural info; and
So what are you waiting for get online and start sharing your knowledge! Let
me know of your wiki activities and I will mention them here. It is all about
sharing.
Links
www.wikipedia.org
the original online collaborative knowledge base
sw.wikipedia.org Swahili encyclopaedia needs your help!
www.wiktionary.org
online dictionaries
www.wikibooks.org
online text books
www.wikiquote.org
Still no entries for Julius Nyerere! Be the first!
www.wikisource.org
online public domain texts
www.disinfopedia.org
who manipulates the news?
fotowiki.net shared photographs
www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/agwiki/ - agriculture wiki.
www.worldwidewiki/wiki/SwitchWiki - a list of all known Wikis in the
world.
duncandrury@yahoo.co.uk |
www.dunxd.com
|
|
|
Features |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
Last
modified:
October 02, 2004
. |
|
Webmaster: WDJMallya |