Monday, December 18, 2006

What I Know Is...

I did not want to start this article saying “United we stand divided we fall” but I could not find a better phrase to describe the strength of unity. The day human beings understood the importance of working together, they formed society. In recent times, often big projects are supervised by a group of experts, then what about Collaborative Authoring, where many people join together to write a great novel and make up good stories?

Points behind functioning collectively are:
  1. Power of the mass
  2. Wisdom of crowd
Collaborative Authoring is not a new concept. It seems great Epics and Mythologies were written collectively. The beauty of Collaborative Authoring is it continues to grow recursively. The input of one author insists the others to put more on it.

With the arrival of web-technologies Collaborative Authoring has become easier and simpler as it is now too easy to communicate a person at the other corner of the world. Different web-based applications have enhanced the process. Relay Writing, International Writing Exchange, h2g2 are few good example of Online Collaborative Authoring.

Despite of being invented lately in the evolution process of Collaborative Authoring, wiki has become a strong and reliable supporter of it. The term wiki could be seen as the acronym of What I Know Is. People assemble at a place, select a topic and say what they know. Now the knowledge of each individual builds up a huge store of information.

Wikipedia, online free encyclopedia, is one good example of wiki-based applications. Wiki sites are easy to edit. The person need not be an expert to modify wiki pages and that is one of the reasons behind the huge popularity of wiki. People having vast knowledge are able to add their expertise to a topic through wiki from anywhere of the world.

Many online message boards and web communities have started interacting through wiki nowadays. One such example is the Community Knowledge Base of Debt Consolidation Care. This is a community that helps people solve their debt and credit related problems and offer responsible guidance to find the most reasonable solution for financial issues.

However, wiki is very much prone to vandalism because it cannot sense the mind of the person who edits it. But as long great minds are there behind it, no threat can damage its glory.

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