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=What are Wiki's?=

Wikis are a collaborative online tool. They are a living organism that is continually growing and changing by the community of readers, writers and learners. Most wikis allow for editing or creating new pages. They track changes so that users can see all revisions made to a document. People who contribute to a wiki must understand and accept that their words may be edited or even possibly deleted. Power and authority is given to the community rather than an individual writer. Wiki authors do not claim ownership of the text. Anyone can go back later and see previous versions in the history.

Wiki is Hawaiin for wiki-wiki which means quick. It began in 1995 by Ward Cunningham who wanted to develop an easy authoring tool that would help people to publish on the web.

[|Wikipedia] (blocked internally) [|The Original Wiki wiki] [|Encyclopedia of Educational Technology] [|USF College Writing] [|Wide Open Spaces: Wikis Ready or Not]

**Why Wikis?**
Wiki is a collaborative environment where students learn much about how to work with others, how to create, communicate and how to work in a world where the creation of knowledge and information is more and more becoming a group effort. They can also be used to facilitate the dissemination of information, to enable the exchange of ideas and to facilitate group interaction.

[| USF College Writing: Why Wikis?] [|Wikibooks takes on textbook industry]