First appearing in 1994, wiki’s allow users to collaboratively create and edit web content online using only a web browser. Wiki assignments require undergraduates to think beyond merely creating aggregated sites for general information. That is, they push students to consider more deeply how they must organize and represent their research. In order to produce coherent web pages, students must demonstrate their understanding of pedagogical and historiographical methods, as well as think imaginatively about how wiki-sites can make archives usable in new or different ways. Thus, in addition to the learning opportunities that wiki-projects offer undergraduates themselves, wiki-projects can generate publicly accessible and searchable research products that can support local archives. 

Wiki-platforms are innately collaborative and public access websites which, as an interactive medium, have the potential to challenge where, how, and for whom history is made and re-made. In a recent publication, Dr. Melanie Kill at the University of Maryland presents a case  for Wikipedia as an environment not only for the collaborative compilation  of knowledge, but also for collaborative inquiry into knowledge-making practices. Wikipedia, she suggests, combines writing as platform for    The platform of Wikipedia, however, has  been challenged from those who self-identify as post-colonial digital  humanists. The majority of Wikipedia editors are white, middle-class,  college-educated men from the U.S., Canada, or Europe. Correspondingly,  Wikipedia reflects the worldview of this social demographic, which is  economically and socially privileged.

Post-colonial digital humanists have argued that the privileges–and blind spots–of this demographic’s worldview also mean that marginalized groups and their histories are less represented on Wikipedia. Thus, Postcolonial Digital Humanists have engaged with Wikipedia editing as a means to intervene in colonial paradigms of knowledge production and imperialist hierarchies of information, such as a Feminist Hacking at a recent THAT CAMP held in Claremont California. 

The medium of Wikipedia, however, is difficult for those involved in people’s history to engage as a result of its editorial policies, particularly those requiring a neutral point of view, verifiability, and prohibiting original research. These limitations point towards the continuing importance of wiki driven projects
independent of Wikipedia.

Wikis differ in the following ways.  Where Wikipedia disallows for original  research, Wikis have the flexibility of requiring it. Further, in the context of classroom study, wikis can question the concept of a “neutral point of  view” and instead argue that all historical knowledge is driven by the  contexts of its political, economic, and social life. Lastly, although wiki  technology fosters collaborative writing, it is at its best when combined with  the sociality of the classroom or institutional cultures of off-campus  partners. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore suggested in her 2010  American Studies Association Presidential Address, expanding undergraduate  education beyond the individual should complement other innovations such  as digital learning and the like. “While social media might produce  interactions not available in pen, paper, and print-media milieu, the face  time required of group projects can powerfully ground the virtual social.”  In this vein, the combination of group assignments, off-campus research,  and wiki technology generated multiple grounds from which students could  socialize, both within and beyond the digital world.