Wikis are an amazing thing. There’s no doubt in the view of the world, that Wikipedia is the best known wiki online – heck, it’s the first step for any research paper for anyone under 35 (I assume others are using libraries and other “research techniques). The Telegraph reported that Wikipedia has seen the plateau of growth and is in the mature stage of a business life-cycle. The challenge comes in getting content on to a site and building a community around it. (And kudos to Jimmy for keeping Wikipedia alive as a non-profit!)
Wikis are easy to use as a reader, but I think the challenge comes in setting them up and getting an active community involved in editing and publishing. Creating and editing a wiki is a language of its own. Wikis have built a new programming language that’s meant to be accessible to the masses — even more accessible than HTML. Click on any most Wikipedia page and you can edit away (unless Stephen Colbert got there first). Learning how to create links to pages that don’t exist – then build around it takes time and organization.
Many services are out there to help ease the adoption. Wikia, probably the largest collection, is a branch of Wikipedia. They have several thousand wikis from Harry Potter to World of Warcraft to Lost. Dozens have entered as well, like PBWiki (yah – it’s like a PB&J, but wiki-style — (now known as PBWorks)), WikiDot, and TWiki.
Wikis are cool, don’t get me wrong, but even as a web developer I find a learning curve with editing them. I have worked on setting up wikis before, and it takes time and planning. How are you going organize the site? What will the homepage feature and who will moderate that? (Not to mention moderation is a whole other topic — see Colbert article above for great example.)
For the record, I do try contribute to a few wikis (of which I won’t mention here as it’ll show my geekness). Wikis bring with them a few main things:
- A community of people contributing towards common knowledge.
- A way for anyone, regardless of who they are, to add, edit, and delete without discrimination (most times).
- An organized, indexed, and searchable way to find content.
- Things link, and link, and link. You can always dig deeper or go higher up. The variety of levels allow you to decide how much you want to know and control the level at which you consume data.
Like the title suggests – wikis rock. The more ways we can put data/content out there and have it be contributed to by those who know the better. (And please, if you’re making a wiki edit, submit comments on your change and always cite where possible.)
