Ex gratia post - not for training purposes

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Wiki - What?

Way back in 1994, Ward Cunningham named his new website technology after the Wiki Wiki shuttle bus system at the Honolulu International Airport - wiki means "quick" in the Hawaiian language.  (1994 !! how come I'm only discovering wikis now in 2010?)

Wikis are certainly quick as opposed to the unit in HTML I had to struggle through at uni.  Then I did a course in  Microsoft FrontPage - FrontPage  is a WYSIWYG editor and web site  administration tool which was quicker at producing a web page but still tedious.  But now we have wikis which are relatively easy to set up and publish to the www and it means that anyone can add to the website so created.  It is a digital tool for collaberation which has many benefits for corporate and private entities.

Wikis are in the news right now namely the Wikileaks about which Ben Macintyre commented in The Times on 02/12/2010 - " In the age of paper, no one individual would have been able to carry, let alone leak, such a vast quantity of information. But what would once have required a fork-lift truck can now be moved with a single USB memory stick."