The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet: Quick Collaboration on the Web [With CDROM]

A "Wiki" is a web site, where every page is editable, by anybody with a browser. It may seem wierd, but it's a very powerful, and successful, idea. The most well-known Wiki has been running since 1994 with thousands of users. This book covers how and why Wiki works, case studies of use, and installing, configuring, and customizing an open-source Wiki supplied on CD. If you know a little about Wiki, and want more, this is a great book. It's sprinkled with practical advice and gives real code examples for enhancements. It can also be inspirational and has got me buzzing with ideas. It has a fine index and all the "tips" are listed for easy reference. Wiki's obscurity is its greatest weakness, though. If you have never heard the term "Wiki", you would never think to pick up this book. I also found that the assumption of Perl in the example software sections clashed with the language independent nature of the theory and case-study sections. And beware that the book ignores or glosses over a few things which require more effort than in other systems. If you find it clumsy or slow to get things on a web site, if you are looking for an easy way to let people collaborate, or if you just want to make sense of all your scattered notes, read this book.

An excellent book about Wiki technology, providing both a hands-on discussion on running and using Wikis and well founded discussions of the philosophical underpinnings of Wiki design (how much formatting to allow, and how much security to provide).I particularly appreciated the comparisions between the various Wiki servers, and would have liked to see even more of that. On the other hand, I thought that the discussion of how to tinker with the bundled QuikiWiki server was somewhat excessive.

WikiWiki has changed my life. It's not only the first-hand influence that I can organize my ideas more efficiently and effectively, but it also has changed the way I look at technology, society, and human collaboration as a whole. Though this book is specifically designed to give a good explanation of Wiki, seen generally, it's much more than that: it is about knowledge management. You'll benefit enormously from this book if you are anyhow involved in Knowledge Management, even if you are not going to use Wiki in your setting. The virtue of this book is that it's in DocumentMode so that the reader can grab the essence of the essences of a few millions of man-hour experiences in a few ticks of the clock; I even feel jealous of the readers who'll read this book as their starting point -- I had to experiment and trial-and-error for several months to get the real meaning of it and WikiMaster Mind. Thank you, Ward Cunningham for writing this wonderful book, and creating wonderful Wiki-Way.

This book describes the technology and culture of the wiki open web authoring system. The CD-ROM contains all the necessary software to install a wiki and one third of the book explains how the software does it's magic and how it might be expanded to do even more. The first part contains a step-by-step introduction to the wiki ideas and culture and the last part tells about the wiki experiences in the corporate world and at universities.The book is written extremely well and easy to follow, sometimes even entertaining. It touches all important aspects of installing and maintaining a wiki server and of running a wiki community. During the last 8 months I did many of the things described based on my own explorations and using a different software. This books would have saved me many weeks of labour. I may lack objectivity, but this book is bound to become the bible for the wiki world.What's to criticize? First: there is almost no hype in this book, too little for the lots of enthusiastic users out there. Second: the book offers a baseline system, some clones and lots of optional extensions and invites to experiment. I think that most readers would prefer a full-featured proven standard system out of the box. Third: it's conservative approach about some features - like edit conflict resolution or page deletion - shows how quickly things are moving.Is this criticism correct? I don't know, you decide. To me, it's an excellent book. It's the important, long awaited reference. It's the landmark showing that the wiki is about to change from an insider tip to an established technology. It clearly deserves 5 (*****) stars. If you are interested in wiki, online communities or knowledge management at all, you must know this book.