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In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "recent changes" page, some wiki engines provide additional content
control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain
pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly.
This can be seen as a very pro-author and anti-editor feature.[23] A watchlist is a common implementation of this.
Some wikis also implement "patrolled revisions", in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark some edits as
not vandalism. A "flagged revisions" system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed.[24]

Trustworthiness and reliability of content

Critics of publicly editable wiki systems argue that these systems could be
easily tampered with by malicious individuals ("vandals") or even by well-
meaning but unskilled users who introduce errors into the content. While
proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content
and correct it.[1] Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the
controversy as follows: "Most people, when they first learn about the wiki
concept, assume that a Web site that can be edited by anybody would soon
be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray
cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly Quality dimensions of the wiki and
graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long other sources: Wikipedia use
lived. Still, it seems to work very well."[12] High editorial standards in case[25]
medicine and health sciences articles, in which users typically use peer-
reviewed journals or university textbooks as sources, have led to the idea of
expert-moderated wikis.[26] Some wikis allow one to link to specific versions of articles, which has been useful to the
scientific community, in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles, improve them and provide links to the
trusted version of that article.[27] Noveck points out that "participants are accredited by members of the wiki
community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing
participation." On controversial topics that have been subject to disruptive editing, a wiki author may restrict editing to
registered users.[28]

Security
The open philosophy of wiki – allowing anyone to edit content – does not ensure that every editor's intentions are well-
mannered. For example, vandalism (changing wiki content to something offensive, adding nonsense, or deliberately
adding incorrect information, such as hoax information) can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites, such as those
run by the Wikimedia Foundation, vandalism can go unnoticed for some period of time. Wikis, because of their open
nature, are susceptible to intentional disruption, known as "trolling". Wikis tend to take a soft-security approach to the
problem of vandalism, making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage. Larger wikis often
employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism and JavaScript
enhancements that show characters that have been added in each edit. In this way, vandalism can be limited to just
"minor vandalism" or "sneaky vandalism", where the characters added/eliminated are so few that bots do not identify
them and users do not pay much attention to them.[29] An example of a bot that reverts vandalism on Wikipedia is
ClueBot NG. ClueBot NG can revert edits, often within minutes, if not seconds. The bot uses machine learning in lieu of
heuristics.[30]

The amount of vandalism a wiki receives depends on how open the wiki is. For instance, some wikis allow unregistered
users, identified by their IP addresses, to edit content, while others limit this function to just registered users. Most
wikis allow anonymous editing without an account,[31] but give registered users additional editing functions; on most
wikis, becoming a registered user is a short and simple process. Some wikis require an additional waiting period before
gaining access to certain tools. For example, on the English Wikipedia, registered users can rename pages only if their
account is at least four days old and has made at least ten edits. Other wikis such as the Portuguese Wikipedia use an

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editing requirement instead of a time requirement, granting extra tools after the user has made a certain number of
edits to prove their trustworthiness and usefulness as an editor. Vandalism of Wikipedia is common (though policed
and usually reverted) because it is extremely open, allowing anyone with a computer and Internet access to edit it,
although this makes it grow rapidly. In contrast, Citizendium requires an editor's real name and short autobiography,
affecting the growth of the wiki but sometimes helping stop vandalism.

Edit wars can also occur as users repetitively revert a page to the version they favor. In some cases, editors with
opposing views of which content should appear or what formatting style should be used will change and re-change
each other's edits. This results in the page being "unstable" from a general users' perspective, because each time a
general user comes to the page, it may look different. Some wiki software allows an administrator to stop such edit
wars by locking a page from further editing until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most
appropriate.[9] Some wikis are in a better position than others to control behavior due to governance structures
existing outside the wiki. For instance, a college teacher can create incentives for students to behave themselves on a
class wiki they administer by limiting editing to logged-in users and pointing out that all contributions can be traced
back to the contributors. Bad behavior can then be dealt with in accordance with university policies.[11] The issue of
wiki vandalism is debated. In some cases, when an editor deletes an entire article and replaces it with nonsense
content, it may be a "test edit", made by the user as she or he is experimenting with the wiki system. Some editors may
not realize that they have damaged the page, or if they do realize it, they may not know how to undo the mistake or
restore the content.

Potential malware vector

Malware can also be a problem for wikis, as users can add links to sites hosting malicious code. For example, a German
Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website. Users of vulnerable
Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link would be infected.[9] A countermeasure is the use of software that
prevents users from saving an edit that contains a link to a site listed on a blacklist of malicious sites.[32]

Communities

Applications
The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World
Wide Web[33] and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of
traffic.[34] Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Memory Alpha,
Wikivoyage, and Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base. Medical
and health-related wiki examples include Ganfyd, an online collaborative
medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-
medical experts.[10] Many wiki communities are private, particularly within
enterprises. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house
The home page of the English
systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to
Wikipedia
help produce software documentation.[35] A study of corporate wiki users
found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of
content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders'
contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.[36] from a study of 1000s
of wiki deployments, Jonathan Grudin concluded careful stakeholder analysis and education are crucial to successful
wiki deployment.[37]

In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream
collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.[38] Wikis can be used for project management.[39][40] Wikis
have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and

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international boundaries.[41] In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic
planning, departmental documentation, and committee work.[42] In the mid-2000s (decade), the increasing trend
among industries toward collaboration was placing a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in
collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom.[9]

Wikis have found some use within the legal profession, and within government. Examples include the Central
Intelligence Agency's Intellipedia, designed to share and collect intelligence, dKospedia, which was used by the
American Civil Liberties Union to assist with review of documents pertaining to internment of detainees in
Guantánamo Bay;[43] and the wiki of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, used to post court
rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The United States Patent and Trademark Office operates
Peer-to-Patent, a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent
applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local
park. Cornell Law School founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called Wex, whose growth has been hampered by
restrictions on who can edit.[28]

In academic context, wiki has also been used as project collaboration and research support system.[44][45]

City wikis
A city wiki (or local wiki) is a wiki used as a knowledge base and social network for a specific geographical
locale.[46][47][48] The term 'city wiki' or its foreign language equivalent (e.g. German 'Stadtwiki') is sometimes also used
for wikis that cover not just a city, but a small town or an entire region. A city wiki contains information about specific
instances of things, ideas, people and places. Much of this information might not be appropriate for encyclopedias such
as Wikipedia (e.g., articles on every retail outlet in a town), but might be appropriate for a wiki with more localized
content and viewers. A city wiki could also contain information about the following subjects, that may or may not be
appropriate for a general knowledge wiki, such as:

Details of public establishments such as public houses, bars, accommodation or social centers
Owner name, opening hours and statistics for a specific shop
Statistical information about a specific road in a city
Flavors of ice cream served at a local ice cream parlor
A biography of a local mayor and other persons

WikiNodes
WikiNodes are pages on wikis that describe related wikis. They are usually
organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor wiki is simply a wiki that
may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate wiki
is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.[49] One
way of finding a wiki on a specific subject is to follow the wiki-node network
from wiki to wiki; another is to take a Wiki "bus tour", for example:
Wikipedia's Tour Bus Stop.
Visualization of the collaborative
work in the German wiki project
Mathe für Nicht-Freaks
Participants
The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are reader, author,
wiki administrator and system administrator. The system administrator is responsible for installation and
maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. The wiki administrator maintains wiki content and is
provided additional functions pertaining to pages (e.g. page protection and deletion), and can adjust users' access
rights by, for instance, blocking them from editing.[50]

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