Foreword

Fundamentally, a wiki is a website that everyone can edit. Contributors don't need to learn complicated programming languages. No software is required beyond a web browser.

Wikis are simply incredible. They allow groups to share information to improve collaboration, foster knowledge sharing and enable learning. This ability to communicate is important just about everywhere — in large corporations, in small companies, in community groups and in charities — but nowhere more so than in the field of education.

At the most basic level, education is about the transfer of knowledge: a learned person, the instructor, passing information to someone who wishes to learn. Knowledge is gained slowly, over time, built up through small but constant additions. Ideas are expounded, theories are proved and discoveries are made. Knowledge is built layer upon layer. Wikis are designed to allow the facilitation of this process in a collaborative and transparent way.

As different editors — student, administrator, instructor — contribute to a wiki document, this same gradual layering of knowledge occurs. This underlines the fundamental power of a wiki. A syllabus can be created not by an instructor alone, but also by teaching assistants, other instructors, even students. A handful (or hundreds) of students can contribute to a class report, a research paper, or a school newspaper. The one-to-many model of knowledge transfer can be transformed into a collaborative, many-to-many network where every voice contributes to the knowledge of the group; the sum becomes greater than its parts.

Anyone can start a new page on the wiki about a topic. From that initial seed, a second reader might decide to improve the article, and a third could add thoughts and details. Later still, the original author could return to revise and synthesize the new contributions. Every change is recorded so that the progress of a document can be easily tracked across interactions and through different authors. Documents are linked and organised to enable readers to browse or search for related information. Even the structure of the wiki - each page's relationship to the others - is open for the readers to improve.

With a wiki, nothing is ever lost. Wikis never forget an edit. Everyone can view the earlier versions of a document and review their peers' changes. This ensures that information isn't wiped out by accident. But more interestingly, it demonstrates how knowledge is grown and refined over the lifetime of a project.

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Unfortunately, when I passed through high school and university, wikis didn't exist. My first experience of using one was in 2002 when we installed a small, Open Source wiki for the four developers in our software company. Our initial desire was to provide a central place to store basic specifications, technical documents, and team learning in a way that everyone on the team could contribute.

Four years after collaborating on our first wiki, things have radically changed. It's no longer just the four of us contributing. Our internal wiki contains the entire sum of our knowledge as a corporation - now thousands of pages of information. It is used by every staff member, every day for a wide variety of tasks. Our sales team tracks customers and collateral, our HR department trains new employees, our developer team debates software design and our management team tracks the company's progress — all within one simply editable, always current, universally available wiki.

Today, Atlassian's Confluence is the world's leading enterprise wiki. Around the globe it manages the contributions of hundreds of thousands of editors daily in thousands of organisations. The amount of knowledge being published today from all spheres of professional and personal life is driving the evolution of the software.

To say I'm a huge wiki fan would be an understatement. Indeed, the rapid growth of Atlassian Software Systems has been both enabled and driven by wikis. Those early wiki applications were limited when compared with advanced, mature features available in today's wiki software, but the power of the wiki concept was clear from the beginning.

In this book, Stewart has collected a series of fascinating studies which show the remarkable range of ways wikis are being used in education - from kindergarten teachers to university researchers, online courses to high school libraries. Though Atlassian is on the forefront of wiki development, it's hard to predict where wikis will be even two years from now. It's not a stretch to say that the future development of wikis will be a collaborative effort. Wiki pages often end up in quite different places than their original authors ever imagined. And wikis will continue to evolve in more dramatic and interesting ways than any one person, or any one company, could dream up alone.

This foreword wouldn't have been possible without a wiki of course. Thanks to my writing collaborators and colleagues, Jonathan Nolen and Jon Silvers. And of course, thanks to Stewart for giving us the opportunity to pontificate on wikis.