Definition
A wiki is a website dynamically editable by its users, allowing the creation, editing, and navigation of dynamically interlinked web pages. They are typically powered by standard wiki software platforms such as MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org). Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham, of the Portland Patterns Group, in 1995 (Cunningham and Leuf 2001).
The most well-known wiki at the time of this writing is certainly Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/), a global web-based free collaborative encyclopedia, published in 282 different languages and currently boasting over 19.9 million articles.
Wikis are widely used to support collaborative content creation, editing, and publishing in biomedical research. Examples include the WikiProteins project (http://conceptwiki.org/index.php/WikiProteins); the NeuroLex neuroscience ontology wiki (http://neurolex.org/wiki); Open Wetware (http://openwetware.org); and many individual entries in Wikipedia itself, (e.g. “Wnt Signalling...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Cunningham W, Leuf B (2001) The wiki way. Addison-Wesley, New York
Waldrop MM (2008) Big data: wikiomics. Nature 455(7209):22–25. doi:10.1038/455022a
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this entry
Cite this entry
Clark, T. (2013). Wiki. In: Dubitzky, W., Wolkenhauer, O., Cho, KH., Yokota, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9863-7_1470
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9863-7_1470
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-9862-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-9863-7
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences