Wiki

A wiki is a web application which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in collaboration with others. In a typical wiki, text is written using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. While a wiki is a type of content management system, it differs from a blog or most other such systems in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader, and wikis have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users.

The encyclopedia project Wikipedia is the most popular wiki on the public web in terms of page views, but there are many sites running many different kinds of wiki software. Wikis can serve many different purposes both public and private, including knowledge management, notetaking, community websites and intranets. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access). For example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules may also be imposed to organize content.

Some wikis, including All The Tropes Miraheze and All The Tropes Fandom/Wikia, are part of wiki farms -- variously-structured collectives of wiki owners that pool their resource (storage, bandwidth, and sometimes domaining) requirements to a single set of servers, whether or not the contents of the connected wikis are related to each other.

Wikis are usually topical in nature, and since their flourishing one can usually find one for almost any subject -- this is sometimes referred to as 'the wiki rule'.

Origins
Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work"; he also consequently started the first wiki, and named the class of software it represented. "Wiki" (pronounced "witi" or "viti") is a Hawaiian word meaning "Quick". Ward's Wiki (also named C2Wiki after the website for his business Cunningham and Cunningham, hosted at the same domain) grew from the project Portland Pattern Repository, a catalogue of software 'patterns' (recipes and methods of development, a usage cribbed from a famous book on architecture).

Soon enough, a second wiki sprung from Ward's Wiki, called MeatballWiki; it was the first meta-wiki, having communities as the main subject, particularly online communities with a focus on wikis.

Wiki Engines Used For Troping

 * PmWiki (WP Page) - A wiki engine created by Patrick Michaud, inventor of the Perl programming language. TV Tropes uses a modified form of this engine for their wiki and started the troping wiki as a concept.
 * MediaWiki (WP Page) - is the same wiki engine used by Wikipedia and many other wikis all over the internet. The Tropes Mirror Wiki (now All The Tropes [Wikia]) on Wikia uses a modified variant of the software, and the one used on Miraheze is based on stock MediaWiki, though with many custom scripts and extensions.