Wikis

This entry describes the socio-technical specificity of wikis and their application in domains of culture, knowledge and learning. It begins by locating the wiki in the history of technological visions for collective cognition and continues by examining the material and social properties of wikis through a series of concepts: collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, openness and open collaboration. It examines some key tensions surrounding the properties of participation within open collaborative systems pointing to empirical research within media and communications, education as well as computer and information sciences. In doing so, it situates the ways in which wiki phenomena have been used to define ideological movements and fields of socio-economic activity in domains of science, culture and politics