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Every day I’ll pick a Internet-related term and try to explain it in plain English. If you know of a term to you would like me translate from geek to English, let me know
Today’s term is a part of a series that focuses on Web 2.0 related terms

If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you might have actually seen this word before since in the Hawaiian language, “wiki wiki” actually means “fast”. But in the Internet world, it describes a piece of software that allows you and anyone else to change a web page…fast!

Wiki’s are web sites that allow anyone that visits to add, change, or delete content. For example, if this web site was a wiki, you can come and change this post into almost anything you like…you could change the topic, add links to other sites, add photos, videos…anything. And then someone else could come along and add something else to this post or make changes to your changes. And then someone else could come and delete the post entirely! Talk about power! Can you get anymore Web 2.0 than that?

Nice, you might be saying, but what’s a wiki good for if everyone can change it? It’ll be chaos! Well, not necessarily. Wikis are good for storing knowledge that might be evolving and changing and for allowing a group of knowledgeable people to make updates quickly. And wiki software does allow you to set different levels of permissions. So you can block off certain pages from being changed, block off certain people from changing things, and be notified when there are changes made.

The first known web site that was set up as a wiki was WikiWikiWeb set up by programmer Ward Cunningham. This site focused on programming and Ward Cunningham wanted to make this web site easy for the people that used it make quick edits. But the most well known wiki is of course the famous Wikipedia…the online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to…which is actually where I found the biography of Ward Cunningham…the guy who helped make Wikipedia possible.

?Update :? The word “wiki” is landed a spot in the Oxford English Dictionary.