The past several years have seen many forms of collaborative electronic communication take shape. Some are based on instant messaging, others are e-mail-centric, still others rely on HTML-based content, and the list goes on. One form that is growing in popularity—though it doesn't yet have the star power of Weblogs, which have grown by several hundred percent this year—is the wiki. A wiki (derived from the Hawaiian term for quick) is essentially a small piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web content using any Web browser and no other special tools. Or, in one simpler description, a wiki is "the simplest online database that could possibly work." No HTML or programming knowledge is needed to contribute to a wiki.

A Google search on the term wiki brings up many examples and resources. Teenagers—probably taking time out from their well-documented instant messaging sessions—are using them to collaborate. People in the scientific community make use of them to cast a wide net for discussion participants on topics of interest. One of the more robust wikis is Wikipedia, which bills itself as "the free encyclopedia." It is a multilingual, open-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The English version contains approximately 120,000 entries. Under Astronomy, you'll find a variety of contributions, from articles on star formation to extragalactic astronomy and more. Under Hobbies there are articles on dumpster diving and restoring antique machinery in addition to the mainstream.

Wikis have several unique properties compared with other kinds of collaborative communication forums. Any and all information being aggregated in a wiki can be changed or deleted by anyone (though many wikis preserve previous copies of posted contributions in the background). Unlike protected Web pages, articles added to a wiki are at the editorial mercy of the wiki's other participants. Ward Cunningham, coauthor of the Addison-Wesley book The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet, refers to this aspect of the wiki as "fragility." There is trust involved in the development of a wiki. Cunningham's book comes with a CD-ROM that enables you to create a wiki easily on a Web server. There's also a free-resources list on the Web.

The positive spin on the fragility of a wiki though, is that any flames or spam can be immediately removed so that wikis imbue good participants with a kind of survival-of-the-fittest power. "You need to generate real content," says one wiki source on the Web. "Anything else will be removed. So anyone can play, but only good players last."

Cunningham also draws many distinctions between wikis and another popular means of Web communication: blogs, or Weblogs. "Blogs and wikis are polar opposites in many ways, though they're seen as similar" he says. "A blog tends to reflect the biases and opinions of an author, while a wiki is more like an open cocktail party. In a wiki you try to speak without a strong voice, seeking consensus to create something permanent, while on a blog you're developing your own voice and it's very much about your voice."

Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes.

In terms of future trends for wikis, Cunningham says "there's a lot of interest in combining the timelessness of wikis—the fact that you can go away from them and come back—with the attention-grabbing aspect of blogs. Integrating blogs and wikis is a hot item right now."