from Forbes: The next big thing, according to Web junkies, is the “wiki.” What are wikis? They are Web sites that are open for editing by anyone with a browser, without any fancy applications or programming skills necessary. Think a reference Web site on the history of Vietnam is biased? Scrub it clean. Think a documented procedure on your company’s Web site is out of date and needlessly inefficient? Rewrite it.
Think of it as an evolution. In the early days of the Web, there were bulletin boards like Usenet. Then, during the boom, Web sites like Geocities (now owned by Yahoo), gave people the ability to create communities of templated personal Web pages. Post-Internet bubble, Web logs offered “bloggers” more customizable personal Web journals and the ability to invite controlled collaboration. Wikis are the next generation: Web spaces that are totally collaborative.
Wikis are being brought to you by the same type of programmers who created Linux, the open-source operating system now competing in the corporate server market with Microsoft’s Windows Server and Sun’s Solaris. Wikis’ idealistic developers believe that these “open to all” Web sites could eventually be a solution to much of what ails the Internet
