Multimedia in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education

Commentary: Wiki: The Fast Way to Collaborative Authoring

Received for publication, July 1, 2005

Graham R. Parslow‡

From the Russel Grimwade School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Melbourne,Victoria 3010, Australia

At the time of writing, I am part of a team of four peopletrying to write a medical problem-based learning tutorialon childhood obesity. The team members are in four sep-arate locations, and we E-mail each other snippets, butonly when we physically meet does the whole emerge.Only one team member has the master version of thedocument. This is a partly E-assisted approach, but as Ihave come to appreciate this is the way of the informationdinosaurs. The clever way to achieve this task is to use awiki. I only discovered the existence of wikis a couple ofweeks previously, and it seems to be a phenomenon wellknown to the computer-face technical people and only justimpinging on the consciousness of senior staff. From Wiki-pedia, the free net encyclopedia [1], we find the definition“A wiki is a web application that allows users to addcontent, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone toedit the content. Wiki also refers to the collaborative soft-ware used to create such a website. Wiki (with an upper-case ‘W’) and WikiWikiWeb are both used to refer specif-ically to the Portland Pattern Repository, the first wiki evercreated. The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki,meaning “quick” or “informal.” It is used commonly inHawaii as part of its “Hawaiian Pidgin,” a native languageof the state. Sometimes wikiwiki or Wikiwiki is used in-stead of wiki. Wikis began in 1995 when a programmer,Ward Cunningham, wrote some software that allowed freecontributions of additional material to the Portland PatternRepository. Cunningham had taken his honeymoon in Ha-waii and caught the WikiWiki bus at the airport [2], and sothis name became attached to his program.

The catalyst for wider adoption of wikis was provided bythe launching of the Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales [2]. Waleswas looking for a way to use the net to create an experi-ence comparable to his childhood pleasure of immersionin Britannica and the World Book Encyclopedia. Wales hadused the Internet in 1989 and recalls “I met all these greatpeople on-line, and we were all discussing things on mail-ing lists no one ever looks at. I thought, why not use thesmarts of my friends and build something more long last-ing, more fun?” [2]. Wales describes himself as a patho-logical optimist and quit his job in commerce, taking 2

years to start an on-line encyclopedia called Nupedia witha mere 12 articles produced in that time. Then Walesdiscovered wikis, and this was his “eureka moment.” Hisgoal became to create an encyclopedia written by all whowanted to contribute. It took Wikipedia just 2 weeks togrow larger than its predecessor. Four years later, Wikipe-dia has 500,000 entries in English and is the cumulativework of 16,000 contributors, much larger than the 65,000articles in the 2005 Encyclopedia Britannica. Testing Wiki-pedia by looking at the entry on enzymes revealed that thecontributor(s) of this information had an indifferent tertiaryeducation when I first looked at it a week previously. Irecalled a line in the style “I know nothing about metals inenzymes so please write something here.” When I wentback to locate this I discovered a much superior entry. I amthereby led to conclude that Wikis work. The disparagingquip of a Brittanica editor quoted in Ref. 2 seems ratherchurlish: “Wikipedia is like a public toilet seat because youdon’t know who used it last.” Wikis in general are chal-lenged by problems of corruption by biased contributors,but major wiki engines such as MediaWiki, MoinMoin,UseModWiki, and TWiki provide ways to limit write accessand to restore previous versions [3].

Asking around my lunch table, I learnt of Lisa Wise, awiki expert in our medical faculty. She showed me “Lisa’swiki” that she uses to compile instructions for using ser-vices in the faculty. She told me that ever more laborato-ries are using wikis to keep lists of references and exper-imental results that dynamically build. I was told that thecooperative paradigm did run into problems when membersbecame proprietary about their intellectual property, butoverall wikis work well. Lisa also introduced me to the self-explanatory word WikiEtiquette. It seems that males andfemales are equally able to wiki (I suspected that femalesmight be better because they are considered to be morecooperative in collaborations). The first conference on wikisis about to be held (International Symposium on Wikis, Oc-tober 17–18, San Diego, CA, www.wikisym.org) with WardCunningham, the inventor of the original WikiWikiWeb, topresent the opening keynote address. Wikis have all theindications of being a major new way of collaboration.

REFERENCES

[1] Wales, J. (2000) The Wikipedia; available on-line at en.wikipedia.org[2] Taylor, C. (2005) It’s a Wiki, Wiki World. Time June 6, 30–32[3] Answers.com (2005) Wiki history and future; available on-line at www.

answers.com/topic/wiki

‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed: RusselGrimwade School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, TheUniversity of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. E-mail:gparslow@unimelb.edu.au.

© 2005 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATIONPrinted in U.S.A. Vol. 33, No. 5, p. 371, 2005

This paper is available on line at http://www.bambed.org 371