Wikis appear to be surrounded by weird terms. You do not need to know these terms to participate on a wiki but, for the curious, here are some of them.
Wiki
A wiki, in its usual form, is a website, on which multiple authors can easily add new pages, edit existing pages, and create links between them.
Wiki Wiki Web (WikiWikiWeb)
This is the name of the first website to be called a wiki. It was launched in 1995 as a way for a group of software programmers to work together from different geographical locations. The name was coined by the site’s originator, David Cunningham, and is derived from wiki-wiki, a Hawaiian term for quick.
Online collaboration
When authors collaborate online on a wiki, they can change each other’s work without prior discussion. The scale of collaboration can be massive, such as on wikipedia. This massive scale of online collaboration has resulted in wiki becoming a metaphor for a new era of online collaboration and participation.
Wikitext (wiki markup)
Wikitext allows users to edit pages without needing to learn the complexities of hypertext markup language (html). For example, when editing Citizendium, simply surrounding text with two equation signs at the beginning and end of the text (==heading for new section==) makes that text the heading for a new section.
Wikitext makes editing wikis easy but the need to use any sort of markup language may discourage people without technical skills from contributing to wikis. There is no standard Wikitext and, therefore, knowledge of Wikitext cannot always be transferred from one wiki to another.
To overcome these problems many wikis, including Citizendium have editing toolbars, which allow users to insert appropriate Wikitext markup using the toolbars.
WYSIWYG (”What You See Is What You Get”) editing is now available on many wikis to make editing easier. Authors see a formatted version of the page and are not exposed to the underlying code. They edit the page using an editing toolbar.
CamelCase
Most early wikis used CamelCase words to identify internal hyperlinks. CamelCase words are words produced by combining two capitalised words without the space in between, as in the word CamelCase itself. These words were often used when naming program identifiers in software programming.
The use of CamelCase to identify hyperlinks in wikis is losing its popularity.
Wiki engine
The software on which a wiki runs is sometimes termed the wiki engine. Wikipedia, Citizendium and many other wikis run on the wiki engine, wikimedia.
Wiki farm
A hosting service, which provides a wiki engine and hosting for several wikis is sometimes called a wiki farm.
Folksonomy
Folksonomy describes the personal tagging systems used to label things on wikis and other internet applications. Folksonomies are very personal, as different people label things in different ways, although there is often overlap.
The word appears to be derived from Folk Taxonomy but is not the same. Taxonomy is usually applied to scientific classifications and folk taxonomy to a stable system of classification developed and maintained over generations within a particular culture.
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