What is a Wiki?

The word ‘wiki’, taken from the Hawaiian language for ‘fast’, describes a type of web technology that allows users to edit a webpage (or group of pages) via a web-browser, from anywhere in the world. In most cases, wiki pages are edited collaboratively, allowing many users to build upon a single resource.

Historically wikis often required users to learn an unfriendly ‘mark-up language’ to add or edit content, making the barrier towards adoption steep for less-technical users. Today however, it is much more likely that a wiki site will use a standard ‘WYSIWYG editor’, much like those found it popular word processing packages, to allow users to create or amend content.

As wikis are essentially webpages, users are not simply limited to adding text as content. It is also possible to add hyper-links, images, video, audio, and even file attachments. Every time a wiki page is modified, a new version of the page is created. This means changes to a page can be tracked and rolled-back if necessary.

Staff at Marjon can create Wikis for their students to use, through the Campus Pack suite of tools in LearningSpace.

An Overview of the Campus Pack Wiki

Setting up a Campus Pack Wiki in LearningSpace

Additional Materials

• eLearning – Wikis – Part 1
  An introduction to Wikis as well as some suggestions on how you can integrate them into your practice.