ReadWriteWeb

Atlassian announced today a new version 4 of its Confluence team collaboration software tool.

We covered version 2.9 here several years ago and since then they have been busy adding all sorts of features, including improving the wiki markup and editing tools, using Twitter-like @mentions to notify users with new content, a collection of macros and other automated content tools, and the ability to paste screenshots, videos and graphics directly into the editing tool.

The wiki turns16 today. How far it has come since that day 16 years ago when Ward Cunningham created a Web page that anyone could edit.

Today, we see the evidence of that pioneering work in all facets of the Web and the emerging app ecosystem.

There are any number of places where first-time entrepreneurs can go to ask questions from others - Hacker News, StackOverflow, Quora, for example. As useful as Q&A sites can be, it's also helpful to have resources gathered together in one place.

That's what Songkick's Ian Hogarth did by creating a Startup Tools Wiki. Built to save others from "re-inventing the wheel," says Hogarth, the wiki gathers useful tools that startups have found and come to rely on. The wiki is meant to gather these resources in one place so companies that are getting started have a wiki to reference.

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been dubbed by some to be "Wiki Revolutions" because "just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia...they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before." Now, it seems that wikis may not only be behind toppling governments, but also stripping plagiarizing government officials of their educational titles.

This week, German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the "Dr" from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Wikia, the for-profit venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is announcing what it is calling the "next generation of collaborative publishing", or put shortly, "Wiki 2.0". This next generation of wikis will include a social layer that brings game mechanics, real-time streams, social sharing and more to the previously walled-in world of the wiki.

The announcement will come as part of Wales' opening keynote at the Digital Hollywood Content Summit in New York on Wednesday morning.

Perhaps you have some spare time on your hands, or perhaps you just want to do good for others from the comfort of your desk chair. Either way, a great way to fulfill these needs is to participate in crowdsourcing - community driven conglomerations of small efforts by large crowds of participants. The simplest form of crowdsourcing are online wikis like the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other great examples. Here are a few great ways to get involved in the wonder of crowdsourcing.

Zoho updated its Zoho Wiki to version 2.0 today, adding features such as granular access controls and the ability to create individual workspaces for different business units, departments, or teams. This represents a shift in Zoho's positioning of the product from a simple app to an enterprise-level platform for intranets, knowledge bases and collaboration.

Jimmy Wales has withdrawn from actively editing, as a "founder," (ie, under a "Founder's flag") Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia he helped to create, and its allied and subsidiary websites. (Wales remains the Founder-Member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees and has all the same editorial rights as any other of the organization's volunteer editors. )

Last week, Fox News started asking representatives at companies that have donated to the group's Wikimedia Foundation for comment on their discovery that Wikimedia Commons had a large collection of photographs that could be described as pornography, even as child pornography. On hearing this, Wales apparently began unilaterally to delete images from the group's servers. This set off a great argument among the encyclopedia's editors.

The wiki market space has transformed over the past few years, with a number of existing players adding social features to stay competitive and be more fully dimensional for users.

But we are starting to wonder how many wiki providers can play in the more established spaces of the market. Perhaps the best potential for emerging vendors is in the small-business market, which is increasingly open to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments.

Enterprise collaboration company Socialtext has launched a mobile edition of its software suite, giving its customers better access to its activity streams, wikis, microblogging and more for the first time. The beta of Socialtext mobile is available now for all users.

Rather than a native application tailored to the iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android, Socialtext chose to create a mobile browser version that is cross-platform by default. The site will detect when you're logging on through a mobile device and redirect you to a subdomain with a custom UI built to resemble Socialtext's desktop app.