A wiki is a website or collaborative software that allows any user to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by others. Wikipedia was created as an information source in an encyclopedia format that is freely available. The license we use grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. UPDATED!
That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.
To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
Article: Wikipedia overtaking major news sites [4], September 6, 2005
WikiGnome - A friendly editor participating in a wiki by contributing helpful little edits and additions without much noise. Obviously, this can be seen as a role adopted more or less occasionally by a person who may or may not be otherwise active on the same wiki.
WikiFairy - Another friendly contributor working to beautify pages on a wiki.
WikiGremlin - Roughly the opposite of a WikiGnome: somebody wreaking havoc and perpetrating sometimes intelligent but always mischievous and malicious edits. Clearly a variant of vandalism.
UPDATE
Newsforge has this article [5] on, "The Wikimedia Foundation [6] uses as the basis of Wikipedia a GPL-licensed application called MediaWiki, and so can you." It is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.
The goals of the foundation are to maintain and develop free content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. In addition to managing the already developed multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, there is a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote and a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks. The Foundation also manages a memorial collection of articles about the September 11 attacks and the operations of the largely dormant Nupedia project (which is not a wiki but is open content). All projects work thanks to a wikiengine called MediaWiki. [7]
