Along with the growth of internet, new style of life came about. More internet based jobs are being created with the sweet work-at-home method, new online ideas are popping up everywhere such as paypal, ebay, and facebook. New internet lingo are being used left and right such as "Let's eBay that thing" for let's put it on internet auction or "I will just Google that and find out" for I will search for it on the Google search engine or "Wiki it" for look it up in a wiki community. For the most part, people are comfortable to adapting to the new terms since it can be based off of certain things in the off line world, but the term wiki can be considered to be just for the Internet.
A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute, or modify content, using a simplified markup language according to Wikipedia, one of the best-known wikis. Wiki is first developed by Ward Cunningham, who is the developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, where he described the system as "the simplest online databse that could possibly work." As time went on, his theory and his system proved to be useful and is now widely used for many purposes, mostly as informative and knowledge management websites along with some uses for an online community.
Though it is not common, wikis are often used to create a community online where users contribute to create collaborative websites to add more to the community archive. The websites are mostly judged by their archive size and their hits or how many people visit the website along with the accuracy of the information provided. With its features of being easily accessible, some wikis today are now being used as a community websites like the facebook and myspace.
Wiki is originally a word in Hawaiian for "fast" but it has been suggested that it stands for the first letter of the phrase "What I Know Is" since wikis are a collection of informative websites made by the public about what they know. The double edge to this system is that although most of the information might be helpful, since it is opened to the public, it might provide the wrong information submitted by someone to the viewers or even the vast amount of information might make it hard for people to search for the information that they need.
New security measures are taken by each wiki communities to prevent the double-edge nature of wikis. The first measure they take is controlling the changes and submissions made by the users. The communities note that the changes made were recent and mark them as that until they are verified and proven correct by many users. Sure it is possible that the community can result in ugly graffiti or even vandalism of the website, but it seems to work well. Other security measure taken is that they record IP addresses of the person editing the article, so if they are proven to be vandalizing the site, they would be banned. But for most part, it is nice to see a new online resource that seems to work well while everyone participates.
