The world of wikis | Online

This year Time magazine's annual Person of the Year award went to 'You'. It seems like a bit of a cop-out but, as their cover read, "Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world." Largely it's because of wikis.

'Wikis' are open-content websites. Anyone can edit a wiki, just go in and modify, add to, or delete it. Wikis take a democratic, community approach to websites, so content decisions are the right of all cyber-citizens.

The internet is rife with sites so inaccurate that one wants to rewrite every word, but most websites are one-way: you can read but you can't touch. Wikis let you edit things, using simple interfaces very similar to Microsoft Word.

Wikis are also a compelling technological development because in a world where media is monitored—some would say manipulated—by governments and big business interests, sometimes the best way to get the sense of an event's complexity is to allow all kinds of people to put forward their 'definitive' version of the story. Following changes made on wikis addressing politics, religion, or ecology makes you realise how tricky the truth about 'history' or 'development' can be.

Wikis are double-edged swords, as content can be unreliable and biased. Vandalism of articles is not unknown, and a low-level problem is edit-wars', where a disputed article is continuously edited and re-edited. Fortunately, simple rollback features on Wikipedia and similar wikis allow for restoring damaged pages to a former non-edited state.

In any case, these are the risks that come with democratising of knowledge, and clearly it's what people want—Wikipedia has over a million user-managed pages and is one of the 100 most visited sites on the Internet. It's best to treat a wiki as you would a crystal ball. Invite it, entice it but don't you dare cite it!