Wiki World

Ever wondered what the result of a combination of open-source, collaboration and lots of information would be? If you still haven’t guessed it, it’s the WIKI world. A wiki is an open-source web site that allows any user to add or edit content. That leads us to the WikiWikiWeb which is an ocean of such sites with wiki technology and wiki jargon like WikiGnome, WikiFairy and WikiGremlin. By the way, wiki means ‘quick’ or ‘super-fast’ in Hawaiian.

Curious about what all this means. Check out wikipedia.com. Published in many languages, it is a free, open-source encyclopedia. The website claims that the English version alone consists of more than 92.8 million words. There are over 745,000 articles in 83 languages. The search feature helps you locate articles of interest.

It is amazing how so much information, which can be edited by anybody, is streamlined, verified and presented in a proper manner. Want to know how? Go to wikipedia.com. There is detailed information about how all the information is managed.

Wikipedia is a wonderful lesson in collaboration. It is very difficult to see this level of collaboration is social and business environments. If only such a medium exists to allow people to collaborate - members of a community, employees of a company, suppliers, customers and more. Wouldn’t the world be a wiki-er (faster, smoother, better) place to live in?