A Glimpse into the Inner Workings of a Wiki Website

The backbone of a wiki is a piece of server software that enables any user to freely create and edit the web's content using any Web browser. It utilizes simple text syntax as a menas for creating new web pages as well as linking between the site's pages.

Wikis date back to 1994 when Ward Cunningham created WikiWikiWeb, the world's first online wiki. Today, the site hosts thousands of pages. The sheer simplicity of the wiki has since made it an increasingly popular and common feature of the Internet.

Wikipedia is the most popular wiki on the Internet, and it is ranked as one of the top 100 sites in the world. All wikis work in a similar way as this popular Site.

If you go to www.wikipedia.org and type any given subject into the search box, you will arrive at a typical Wikipedia article. For example, if you decide to search for "World Wrestling Entertainment," you will arrive at an article containing information on the wrestling company known as WWE. This article is a perfect example of a wiki.

Most wikis have an edit button near the top of the article. Through out the web page, there are more edit buttons. Pressing on any one of them enables you to change, add, edit, or delete information. In each little section of the article, you will see an 'edit' button. By pressing this button, you can add, edit, or delete certain information.

Most Wikipedia articles are reliable, and you will hardly see any evidence of vandalism, profanity, or links to inappropriate websites. So how can Wikipedia be so reliable if anyone can edit it?

Wikipedia is surprisingly reliable because it is community based. Article vandalism is rare because it is very easy for people to be able spot any evidence of vandalism. If such an incidence is spotted, the user or IP address is immediately banned from ever editing on the website again.

A large proportion of the Wikipedia community is its readers, another portion acts as its article writers, and the final portion of the community is dedicated to editing and revising articles. Also, if you have been contributing to Wikipedia for a certain amount of time, you can be granted the privileges of being an administrator. Administrators have the power to delete and undelete pages, block user IP addresses, and other administrative duties.

The wiki is internet-powered democracy in action.