OED adds a new word: “wiki”

Posted by Angela Beesley on March 15, 2007 (Wiki)

“A type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language.“

I’m not too impressed with this draft entry from the Oxford English Dictionary for their new word “wiki“.

A wiki is more than just a web page and doesn’t even need to be a page on the web. It can be offline or internal. A wiki is also the collection of those pages, the software that runs it, and the community that creates it.

It is rare that all content on a wiki can be edited by anyone who accesses it. Most wikis have at least some protected areas and many wikis are far more restrictive about who may edit, restricting it to people with accounts and even putting limitations on who is allowed to make an account. Some people choose to completely lock their personal wiki, not permitting anyone else to edit.

The idea that wikis use a simplified markup language misses the recent development of wysiwyg editors for wikis. The markup language is sometimes not required or even not present. Wikia is developing a wikiwyg system where users will be able to choose wysiwyg editing or wiki markup, but other wiki engines have moved completely to wysiwyg so that all the advanced features that wiki markup allows are not even available.

So, a wiki is not necessarily a web page, can not always be edited by anyone, and doesn’t always involve wiki markup.

The best description I’ve seen of a wiki is on MeatballWiki’s page about Ward’s Wiki Way book:

“A wiki, at its most efficient and most stunning, is not a category. It is not a technology. It is not a notebook. It is not a website. It is not a medium. It is not a community. It is not a place. Rather, it is the sum totality of everything, including all those things; and all those things centre around the dynamic of its essential parts and dimensions: community, content, code, network, atemporal, place.“

A wiki doesn’t have to have any of the things the OED says it has, and instead is so much more than their new definition implies.

See Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and the Urban dictionary for other definitions of wiki.

Reuters: “Wiki” wins a place in Oxford English Dictionary.

OED: Other words added March 15th.

4 Comments

  1. Leon said,

    March 18, 2007 at 7:10

    how can a wiki be effective offline (in terms of “off the computer”). The term Wiki means “fast” in Hawaiian, so I can’t see how the concept works offline.

  2. Angela Beesley said,

    March 18, 2007 at 7:17

    I meant offline as in off the internet, not off the computer. For example, wikis on intranets or a local wiki stored on your computer for personal use. Also, Socialtext Unplugged lets you edit wiki pages while disconnected from the internet.

  3. Russell Blackford said,

    March 20, 2007 at 0:43

    Given that it’s a “draft”, have you contacted the OED about it? It can’t hurt to try to set them straight, if you haven’t already had a go.

  4. wide open spaces » Blog Archive » All Open said,

    April 4, 2007 at 11:51

    […] Beesley, co-founder of Wikia and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation tells us what a wiki means for her, leads us to a definition of free cultural works and points to the discussion Open Knowledge vs […]