Wikis
Wikis
The term "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian phrase, "wiki wiki," which means "very fast." The term has been adopted to describe a type of website in which each item of content may be edited by a collaboration of of different authors.
This means that a single article on a wiki may have thousands of authors! With so many authors making a contribution, the articles can very quickly develop.
The most popular wiki is 'Wikipedia'. Since its creation in 2001, it has grown into one of the world's largest reference websites, containing over 48 million articles that are maintained by over 70,000 contributors.
If you intend to use information from a wiki to support your learning, you should take care to evaluate the accuracy of that information.
A reference to a wiki will generally require the following elements:
Example
Main article:
Info from the foot of the article:
In-text citation
Note: As no author can be identified, the article title is used.
| During the time of the Industrial Revolution, Wigan developed into a major coal mining district and at its peak there were a thousand pit shafts within five miles of the town centre ('Wigan', 2019). |
Full reference for the Reference List / Bibliography
Note: As no author can be identified, the article title is used.
| 'Wigan' (2019) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigan (Accessed: 22 March 2019). |
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