It's for encyclopedias, of course.

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A wiki is basically a collection of web pages that can be edited on the fly from within a web browser that maintains a record of each change made. By that definition, BTW, a Google document can be considered a wiki, and to a certain extent the decline of the popularity of wikis derives from the popularity, and ease of use, of Google documents, and many other easily edited web documents. It's a good guess that most people who have edited a wiki aren't familiar with the process of FTP, of having to locally save a copy of a document, edit it, and then upload it again to its website. The interface for editing a wiki may be a bit awkward, but making changes is quick and easy.

Ten and fifteen years ago numerous wikis sprang up, and many companies maintained wikis in order to share and develop internal corporate knowledge. Some of these were successful, meaning that many workers contributed to them and used them. But on the whole these waned - probably because it's hard to reach a critical mass of users that permits growth without too much responsibility falling on too few people. But they waned for an additional reason - many people mistakenly understood that a wiki is an encyclopedia. In other words, the immense success of Wikipedia caused people to identify all wikis with Wikipedia such that no other use for the tool seemed even possible.

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Go to: It's in its DNA, or
Go to: How to write a Boidem column.