Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

7.3. Wikis

A Wiki is a type of web site that allows visitors to easily change the content of existing pages and add new pages on the fly. Once you visit a Wiki page, if you have permissions, editing the content is a button click away. If you want to create a new page, edit the page and use a simple markup language known as WikiText to add a link to the page you want to create. Return to the main page and once you click the link, the page is created and ready for content.

Wikis were formed in the 1990s by Ward Cunningham, who was looking for an easy way to create content and have it be maintained by a public. Ward initially launched WikiWikiWeb as the first Wiki, and adoption of the technology started booming. Wikis have joined the mainstream with sites like Wikipedia, a huge searchable repository of information on every topic imaginable that allows visitors to modify encyclopedia entries as events happen.

This growing popularity prompted the addition of Wikis to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Teams can use this approach to keep documentation, internal development standards, meeting notes, and any other content that can be shared and modified with ease. Using the security model of SharePoint sites, allowing member access is quite simple. The following section covers how to start a Wiki using SharePoint as well as securing your Wiki. SharePoint does not require the user to know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), allowing for more users to build pages without any background in web ...