xpert peer reviewers to provide links to trusted version of articles which they

have analyzed.[34]

Security
"Edit war" redirects here. Not to be confused with Edit conflict. For Wikipedia's
policy on edit warring, see Wikipedia:Edit warring.
Trolling and cybervandalism on wikis, where content is changed to something
deliberately incorrect or a hoax, offensive material or nonsense is added, or
content is maliciously removed, can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites it is
possible for such changes to go unnoticed for a long period.

In addition to using the approach of soft security for protecting themselves,

larger wikis may employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically
identify and revert vandalism. For example, on Wikipedia, the bot ClueBot NG uses
machine learning to identify likely harmful changes, and reverts these changes
within minutes or even seconds.[35]

Disagreements between users over the content or appearance of pages may cause edit
wars, where competing users repetitively change a page back to a version that they
favor. Some wiki software allows administrators to prevent pages from being
editable until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most
appropriate.[3]

Some wikis may be subject to external structures of governance which address the
behavior of persons with access to the system, for example in academic contexts.
[25]

Harmful external links

As most wikis allow the creation of hyperlinks to other sites and services, the
addition of malicious hyperlinks, such as sites infected with malware, can also be
a problem. For example, in 2006 a German Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm
was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website, and users of vulnerable
Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link had their systems infected with the
worm.[3] Some wiki engines offer a blacklist feature which prevents users from
adding hyperlinks to specific sites that have been placed on the list by the wiki's
administrators.

Communities
Applications

The home page of the English Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide
Web[36] and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.[37] Other
large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Memory Alpha, Wikivoyage, and previously
Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base. Medical and health-related wiki
examples include Ganfyd, an online collaborative medical reference that is edited
by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts.[38] Many wiki communities
are private, particularly within enterprises. They are often used as internal
documentation for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to
allow customers to help produce software documentation.[39] A study of corporate
wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of
content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact
on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by
being able to accomplish their immediate work.[40] From a study of thousands of
wiki deployments, Jonathan Grudin concluded careful stakeholder analysis and
education are crucial to successful wiki deployment.[41]

In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated
that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies
by 2009.[42][needs update] Wikis can be used for project management.[43][44]
[unreliable source] Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing
and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries.
[45] In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant
writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work.[46] In
the mid-2000s, the increasing trend among industries toward collaboration placed a
heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work,
inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.[3]

Wikis have found some use within the legal profession and within the government.
Examples include the Central Intelligence Agency's Intellipedia, designed to share
and collect intelligence assessments, DKosopedia, which was used by the American
Civil Liberties Union to assist with review of documents about the internment of
detainees in Guant�namo Bay;[47] and the wiki of the United States Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit, used to post court rules and allow practitioners to
comment and ask questions. The United States Patent and Trademark Office operates
Peer-to-Patent, a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art
relevant to the examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has
used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local
park. Cornell Law School founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called Wex, whose
growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit.[32]

In academic contexts, wikis have also been used as project collaboration and
research support systems.[48][49]

City wikis
A city wiki or local wiki is a wiki used as a knowledge base and social network for
a specific geographical locale.[50][51][52] The term city wiki is sometimes also
used for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region.
Such a wiki contains information about specific instances of things, ideas, people
and places. Such highly localized information might be appropriate for a wiki
targeted at local viewers, and could include:

Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or

social centers
Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop
Statistical information about a specific road in a city
Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor
A biography of a local mayor and other persons
Growth factors
A study of several hundred wikis in 2008 showed that a relatively high number of
administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth;[53] access
controls restricting editing to registered users tends to reduce growth; a lack of
such access controls tends to fuel new user registration; and that a higher ratio
of administrators to regular users has no significant effect on content or
population growth.[54]

Legal environment
Joint authorship of articles, in which different users participate in correcting,
editing, and compiling the finished product, can also cause editors to become
tenants in common of the copyright, making it impossible to republish without
permission of all co-owners, some of whose identities may be unknown due to
pseudonymous or anonymous editing.[3] Some copyright issues can be alleviated
through the use of an open content license. Version 2 of the GNU Free Documentation
License includes a specific provision for wiki relicensing, and Creative Commons
licenses are also popular. When no license is specified, an implied license to read
and add content to a wiki may be deemed to exist on the grounds of business
necessity and the inherent nature of a wiki.
Wikis and their users can be held liable for certain activities that occur on the
wiki. If a wiki owner displays indifference and forgoes controls (such as banning
copyright infringers) that they could have exercised to stop copyright
infringement, they may be deemed to have authorized infringement, especially if the
wiki is primarily used to infringe copyrights or obtains a direct financial
benefit, such as advertising revenue, from infringing activities.[3] In the United
States, wikis may benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which
protects sites that engage in "Good Samaritan" policing of harmful material, with
no requirement on the quality or quantity of such self-policing.[55] It has also
been argued that a wiki's enforcement of certain rules, such as anti-bias,
verifiability, reliable sourcing, and no-original-research policies, could pose
legal risks.[56] When defamation occurs on a wiki, theoretically, all users of the
wiki can be held liable, because any of them had the ability to remove or amend the
defamatory material from the "publication". It remains to be seen whether wikis
will be regarded as more akin to an internet service provider, which is generally
not held liable due to its lack of control over publications' contents, than a
publisher.[3] It has been recommended that trademark owners monitor what
information is presented about their trademarks on wikis, since courts may use such
content as evidence pertaining to public perceptions, and they can edit entries to
rectify misinformation.[57]

Conferences
Active conferences and meetings about wiki-related topics include:

Atlassian Summit, an annual conference for users of Atlassian software, including

Confluence.[58]
OpenSym (called WikiSym until 2014), an academic conference dedicated to research
about wikis and open collaboration.
SMWCon, a bi-annual conference for users and developers of Semantic MediaWiki.[59]
TikiFest, a frequently held meeting for users and developers of Tiki Wiki CMS
Groupware.[60]
Wikimania, an annual conference dedicated to the research and practice of Wikimedia
Foundation projects like Wikipedia.
Former wiki-related events include:

RecentChangesCamp (2006�2012), an unconference on wiki-related topics.

RegioWikiCamp (2009�2013), a semi-annual unconference on "regiowikis", or wikis on
cities and other geographic areas.[61]
See also
icon Internet portal
Comparison of wiki software
Content management system
CURIE
Dispersed knowledge
List of wikis
Mass collaboration
Universal Edit Button
Wikis and education
Notes
The realization of the Hawaiian /w/ phoneme varies between [w] and [v], and the
realization of the /k/ phoneme varies between [k] and [t], among other
realizations. Thus, the pronunciation of the Hawaiian word wiki varies between
['wiki], ['witi], ['viki], and ['viti]. See Hawaiian phonology for more details.
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