I was a Conservapedia Administrator

Explaining Wikis

My first introduction to a "Wiki" was, like most, to Wikipedia, "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit". On Wikipedia, you don't have to register an account, and if you do, like most web-sites that have registration, you can invent any name for yourself that you like. I had used a pseudonym on other sites, but in this case I decided to use my real name, and registered on 8^th July 2004.

Because they allow anyone to edit, there's little to stop a troublemaker from deliberately editing an article to include erroneous information. However, even though such vandals can make those edits, other editors can easily change them back again. Wikipedia also has "sysops", elected overseers who have extra authority and abilities, including the ability to "block" an account and the Internet address (IP address) of their computer, to stop them from editing again for a period of time. However, there is little to stop a determined troublemaker from editing again if he wishes. All he has to do is edit from another Internet address, either using another computer, or by using a "proxy". The latter involves sending their edits via an intermediate computer network, so the edits appear to be coming from the address of that intermediate computer.

The software that Wikipedia uses, known as MediaWiki, keeps a record of every edit, so anyone can look at the history of any page can see who (which account or IP address) made changes when, and can also look at the content of any page at any point in that history; that is, to see a particular "version" of the page. In addition, any two different versions can be compared to see what changes have been made. These comparisons are known as "diffs", as they show the differences between the two versions.

Of course, outright vandalism is not the only problem that arises. Another very common problem is when two (or more) different editors simply disagree on what the content of an article should be. This is supposed to be handled by discussing the disagreement on the article's "talk page". Every article has an associated "talk page", an associated page that can be edited by anyone just like the article page itself, which is there to allow discussion about the content of the article. Often, when an issue is raised on the talk page, other editors who have not been part of the disagreement will join the discussion.

In many cases, the outcome is that one proposed change is supported by more editors than the other, and is thus the one adopted. In other cases, both (or all) sides will simply keep changing the article to reflect how they think it should be. This is known as an "edit war", and may only be stopped by a sysop stepping in.

Sysops also have the ability to delete articles. Deleting an article means that not only is the content gone, but the history as well. (That is, it's gone from public view. It all still remains in the database—unless further deleted from there as well—and deleted articles are visible to sysops who can also restore the article and its history. The restoration process allows the sysop to selectively restore the history, so that not all previous changes are available in the history of the article.)

Editors can also copy pictures to Wikipedia to include in articles, and can "move" or "rename" articles. These two seemingly-different actions are actually the same thing. An article's title or name is also it's "address", so in order to "rename" it, it has to be "moved" to a new address. It's like a family living at 2 Smith Street, Onetown, and they decide that they would like to "rename" their address to 4 Jones Avenue Twotown. The only way to "rename" their address is to move to the new address.

Every editor also gets their own "user page". On this they can put information about themselves, so that other editors can learn something about them. And, like article pages, every user page has an associated talk page. These are used to have conversations with particular editors (as distinct from conversations about particular articles). Like every other page, these user and user talk pages can be edited by anyone, although convention and courtesy is that one should not normally edit another's user page, nor do anything to their talk page other than "post" (put) messages there.

The MediaWiki software, which is available at no charge, is designed specifically for collaborative effort, and for maintaining a history of who has edited what. The software includes numerous "tools", such as the ability to list all the edits of any editor, to maintain a list of pages that each editor wants to keep an eye on (a "watchlist") and shows which ones have been changed since the editor last looked at them, a list of all recent edits by anyone on any pages, and so on.

Another feature of the software is the ability to "categorise" pages, particularly articles. And with several pages categorised as, for example, "Christian authors", anyone can get a listing of all "Christian authors" pages. Pages can have more than one category, and categories can themselves be categorised, effectiving make some categories "sub-categories" of other categories.

When editing a page, an editor can type special "codes", often simply duplicated ordinary characters, in order to provide formatting (bold, italic, etc.), and to provide a link to another page. If the page being linked to doesn't exist, the software shows this link in red, instead of the blue used for links to pages (and other websites) that do exist.

Many other, usually more specialist, web-sites have adopted the MediaWiki software to allow similar collaborative effort. Examples are Creation Wiki and, the point of all this, Con­serva­pedia.