Bliki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Bliki (also known as a WikiLog, Wog, WikiWeblog, Wikiblog, or Bloki), is a blog with wiki support. This means that after (or before) an article is posted to the blog, it can be edited, either by anyone or by members of some group of authorized users.

This combination of the two Internet concepts was conceived in 2003 with the purpose of making the popular blogging experience more interactive. Another possible effect (especially for news blogs) is the improvement of the quality and accuracy of the articles posted by giving more people the ability to edit them. However, trolling may become a problem in such systems and steps should be taken to counteract malicious interactions.

The main advantage of combining the two concepts, however, is in leveraging the utility of wikis at making connections between ideas; this effectively turns blog posts into proper wiki articles, but maintains the former's immediate nature. Thus, a bliki can evolve as a whole over time, and past information is not merely jettisoned into the aether and lost in the shuffle.

Many wiki engines are capable of providing an RSS feed, so that users can subscribe to receive notifications of updates and changes. However, a content management system with an RSS feed is not necessarily a blog; so a wiki engine with RSS support is not necessarily a bliki. Blikis look more like a blog than wikis, typically showing reverse-chronological order, date-labeled, entries.

Due to the increasing popularity of both blogs and wikis, and their consequent commercialization, a great deal of ambiguity as to the distinction between the two has been created. Some software marketed as being for the creation of wikis, are little more than partner blogs, some are nothing more than text editors. The key difference to keep in mind is that a true wiki is actively collaborative, that is, anyone can edit the document at any point in the document, whether that is to insert a comma, strike a sentence, or add an additional page. Blogs tend to function more like monologues, or pronouncements from the author(s) to which readers may append their own comments without the ability to alter the original blog text.

The same cautions should also be taken with regard to forum software marketed as suitable to creating a wiki.