Exploring THE WORLD OF WIKIS!

Hello everybody!
This week we are supposed to explore the world of wikis. In particular, we are supposed to analyse their audience, their language, their characteristics and especially, to understand what they are and how they work.

According to the authors of Wikipedia, one the most common and used wikis on the Web, a wiki is "a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available contents..."

Ananlysing the home page of Wikipedia I realised that the structure of this website is very simple. At the top there is a welcome message and on the right there are some portals. A portal is an introductory page for a given topic; in Wikipedia we can find Arts, Biography, Geography, History etc.
At the centre of the page there is an article ("Today's featured article"), some news and curiosities ("Did you know..." and "On This Day..."). Furthermore, in "Other Areas of Wikipedia" you can find some important and useful links. In my opinion the most useful ones are: "Help desk" (you can ask questions about the use of Wikipedia), "Village pump" (you can find discussions on Wikipedia) and finally, "Site news" (there are announcements, updates and articles on Wikipedia).
At the bottom of the home page there is "Wikipedia's sister projects" (a section dedicated to the other projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization), and "Wikipedia languages" (a list where you can find Wikipedia in other languages).
On the left there are some links ("community portal", "featured content", "current events" etc.), the search button, a toolbox with many links and, finally, the list of the languages in which Wikipedia is available. I clicked on "deutsch" in order to see if and how this version of Wikipedia differed from the English one and I realised that the contents were the same but the structure of the page changed a little bit.

As far as the language used in Wikipedia is concerned, it is very simple and clear. In my opinion this is due to the fact that everybody can use this website (everybody can add, remove, edit or change the contents of the pages) and therefore, everybody has to understand the contents of the page or pages. Therefore, in my opinion there isn't a specific audience Wikipedia is aimed at; everybody can use it.

Searching in Google I found many other interesting wiki sites:
- TWiki- an Enterprise Collaboration Platform (a wiki and an enterrprise collaboration platform);
- WordPress WikiItaly (a WordPress Italy Blog, Forum, Wiki and Start);
- WikiHow (a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual);
- Wikitravel (a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide).
All these wikis differ from each other only in their contents. The language used is very simple and the kind of structure of their home page is very similar.

Well, that's all for the moment!
Have a nice week!
Barbara