What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a collection of Web pages that can be viewed on the Web and edited by anyone who can find them and would like to change their content. Wikis are wonderful ways for distributed people to collaborate, because you can see and edit the Wiki anywhere you can see the Web, and because the edits become a long-term record of your changes. You can easily go back to earlier versions if you don't like a change, or go forward to a later version if you accidentally went back. Many wikis are editable by anyone on the Web. A great example of a world-editable wiki is wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), which is an entire free encyclopedia being created by volunteers all over the world. Try it: you'll love it!
Other wikis are only editable by small groups of people. These wikis still get all the benefits of the world-editable wikis, but are more private.
What is a WikiLens Wiki?
WikiLens is a project to make it easy for anyone -- even Web beginners -- to build recommenders for anything they would like to recommend to others or have others recommend to them. All you have to do to use a WikiLens is visit it, look at the discussions of the items, and choose recommendations to follow.
As you become more experienced with the WikiLens Wiki you will want to edit some of the pages to leave recommendations for other users. You'll probably even want to create pages describing new items that are not yet in the Wiki. You may even want to create whole new categories of items to recommend to other users. This tutorial will teach you how to do all of these things.