Life is a Mystery
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LOCKSS Wiki

/ 01 April 2004

It seems that wiki’s are getting more mainstream every day. We’ve been participating in a Humanities project with the LOCKSS folks at Stanford. I just got a message from Vicky Reich letting us know that LOCKSS has set up a wiki for the project. She says:

Wikis are widely used to facilitate collaboration via the Web -“wiki-wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”. The biggest Wiki in use is the Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page The software is fairly easy to use and facilitates documentation and collaboration. We find them fun and extremely useful. We will be adding access control so only humanity project team members will have read and write privileges.

That last reiterates a way in which the wiki way will be compromised as they do hit the mainstream: wiki’s are founded on open editorial access, but many mainstream wikis (including our staff web server) will insist on some access control.