The EOS Wiki

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UPDATE (05/09/05): Wikis are always open to spamming and several people recently took advantage of that fact by spamming the EOS wiki with ads for prescription drugs and other junk. I've now taken a number of steps to prevent this happening again and I've removed all of the spam I could find. Google is still serving up ads for prescription drugs on some pages, but that should change once they spider the site again. I think the new security measures will be effective. I haven't seen new spam since they were implemented, but that doesn't mean it won't show up again sometime. However if it does, I now have code in place that should deal with it.

"What's a Wiki"?

A Wiki (which is a term derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick") is basically a website which can be authored and edited by a team, via a web browser interface. In the case of the EOS Wiki, anyone can contribute a new page and anyone can edit an existing page. It has great potential in that it might take one person 1000 days to write a 1000 page website, but it might only take 1000 people 1 day to write a similar sized website. A Wiki can grow and evolve very rapidly.

"But if anyone can write a page or edit anyone else's page doesn't that lead to chaos"?

Potentially, yes, in practice, not often. While anyone can edit any page, anyone can roll back the page to an earlier version. All earlier versions are saved, so information can never be truely erased (except by the Wiki administrator, which in this case is me!). The idea is that since nobody can suppress the views of anyone else, eventually a page either settles down to a consensus, or it ends up giving both sides of an argument.

"Can't someone just delete the whole thing?"

Since anyone can edit a page, they can also erase it. However as I said above, all previous edits are saved and anyone can roll a page back to a previous version, so if you go in and delete all the text on a page, the next visitor to that page can simply restore all the erased text with a couple of mouse clicks. Erasing is easy, but restoring is easy too, so why would anyone bother to try to cause trouble. It's just not worth the effort and any effort made to do it can be cancelled out by any other user!

"How do you create and edit pages?"

You create a (blank) page by making a reference to it on any other page. To edit a page you just click the "edit" link. So for example if there was a page on "Widgets" and you wanted to make a sub-page on "Blue Widgets" you'd just edit the text on the Widgets page to include a link to the Blue Widgets page. The Blue Widgets page would be created and you could then edit it!

In a Wiki you can make a link just by running two words together using an upper case letter to start each word. So if this was a Wiki and I typed the word BlueWidgets, then the system would create a page called BlueWidgets and make all occurrences of the word BlueWidgets anywhere on the website into a link like this BlueWidgets

You can also make a BlueWidgets link by typing {{Blue Widgets}}, which would display as BlueWidgets , or you can make a link to a BlueWidgets page using alternate text like this [[BlueWidgets alternate text}} which would display a link alternate text which would link to the BlueWidgets page.

There are help files for formatting and a special area of the site known as the SandBox where you can play around with text formatting and see what the various commands do.

"What if I make a mistake?"

If you make some sort of formatting error, or if you make a factual error, someone will come along and correct it! Obviously you should try to do the best you can, but if you make a mistake, don't worry too much about it. If the Wiki attracts enough participants, it will evolve into an accurate and well formatted document.

"Why set up a Wiki?"

Because it can be done! It's an experiment. I don't know if it will evolve into a useful tool, but I think it might and if so, it's worth doing. I have very little control over the way in which it evolves or what subjects are covered. I can delete pages (in a manner so that they cannot ever be recovered) and I can set passwords so only authorized users can edit pages, but I don't intend to do that unless absolutely necessary. Obviously I'll delete SPAM and any efforts made to deliberately disrupt the site, but apart form that it's much more interesting to watch how it grows than to try to control it. If I want control over a page, I'll write it and put it on here!

"OK, I'm sold on the idea. Where is it?"

Right here: EOS Wiki