Sharon McGimsey's List: Wiki-How to

• Fundamentally, forums and wikis serve different purposes. wikis are good for creating a relatively compact knowledgebase, but aren't great for building a community. forums are much better for allowing members to interact with each other, but the knowledge tends to be dispersed and somewhat lower in density.   <!-- /post -->  
• You can have them both. It is a trend now to have wiki at the forum. forum should be the primary site (in my humble opinion). Let forum members have access to the wiki.

  I don't think anyone would be interested to edit your wiki unless your site is wikipedia or they have something to benefit out of it e.g. adding link to their sites.   <!-- /post -->    
• 
  forum is a better idea as it has much more features than wiki   <!-- /post -->  

• why should people be more willing to contribute to a forum?

  People come to a forum to communicate, exchange thoughts, etc. In forum, you can just type "OK" and it is considered as one post or article. To post in wiki you need to write an article which takes away a lot of your time.

  I regret that I started late in having a forum at my site. If only I started earlier I could have a few hundred thousand posts at my forum. :S   <!-- /post -->    

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• Important Things to Consider When Choosing Wiki Software

   

   

   
  • Programming language 
  • Ease of installation 
  • Security 
    • Permissioning 
    • Spam prevention 
     
  • Ease of use 
  • Cost 
  • Syntax 
  • Version control 
  • Ability to hold discussions 
  • RSS 
  • Ability to change look 
• Important Things to Consider When Choosing Wiki Software
• • Programming language 
  • Ease of installation 
  • Security 
    • Permissioning 
    • Spam prevention 
     
  • Ease of use 
  • Cost 
  • Syntax 
  • Version control 
  • Ability to hold discussions 
  • RSS 
  • Ability to change look 

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• Experiment: Changing a Page
• Working on Wikipedia
  

  The only reason that a wiki works is because the community of people who work on it make it work. The community adds all of the content, edits everything and polices the content to root out problems. When the community is functioning well, it can produce a tremendous amount of content that gets better and better over time.  If you are so inclined, you can become a member of the Wikipedia community (or any other wiki community). You can contribute either as a writer or an editor. If you would like to get actively involved, you should first look at the Wikipedia FAQ, and especially the Contributing FAQ, to learn about the editing tools and conventions of Wikipedia.
• What will happen is that the Wikipedia community will react to your change in some way. If the community has no problem with what you wrote, then your change may still be there completely unaltered one day later. If what you entered was wrong or vandalistic, you will find that it has been removed. If you make a typo or two (try it), chances are that someone will come along and fix your typos. If you format your entries incorrectly or speak in the wrong voice, someone will edit your addition. In other words, your change will be either accepted, altered or rejected by the community. In that way, pages on Wikipedia are expanding and changing all the time.

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• See my advice for building a successfull wiki at ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it (on my blog) and So You Want to Build a Wiki? (from WebJunction).

• Hosted Wikis/Wiki Farms (your wiki on another company's servers) 

   
  • PBWiki (free) 
  • Schtuff (free) 
  • SeedWiki (free) 
  • Wikispaces (free) 
  • EditMe.com 
  • JotSpot, (shuts down on January 15th, 2009, migrating to Google sites) 
  • SocialText (enterprise wiki) 
  • Netcipia (free and enterprise wiki) 
  • Wetpaint (free but can upgrade to remove ads) 

• Hosted Wikis/Wiki Farms (your wiki on another company's servers) 

   
  • PBWiki (free) 
  • Schtuff (free) 
  • SeedWiki (free) 
  • Wikispaces (free) 
  • EditMe.com 
  • JotSpot, (shuts down on January 15th, 2009, migrating to Google sites) 
  • SocialText (enterprise wiki) 
  • Netcipia (free and enterprise wiki) 
  • Wetpaint (free but can upgrade to remove ads) 

• Many Topics, Many Wikis
  There are thousands of other wikis on the Internet now. As a genre, wiki sites are growing rapidly. Here are several examples:

  • WikiTravel
  • WikiHow
  • Wiktionary
  • SwitchWiki - a large directory of wikis

• there are tools that make it easy for the community to find and remove vandalism. There are also other tools available on Wikipedia to help corral users who are persistently destructive. For example:

  • It is easy for anyone who sees vandalism to revert pages back to a pre-vandalism state.
  • It is easy for any user to alert the rest of the Wikipedia community to vandalism that is in progress.
  • It is possible for an admin to block or ban users (or IP addresses) who are persistently destructive.
  • It is possible for an admin to protect a page temporarily to keep people from changing it.
  • It is possible for an admin to delete an inappropriate page.

  Tools like these make it easy for members of the community to quickly eliminate vandalism and prevent vandals from coming back.
• In an edit war, two or more people edit or revert pages over and over again in order to express their point of view.
• In an edit war, two or more people edit or revert pages over and over again in order to express their point of view.

• Many Topics, Many Wikis
  There are thousands of other wikis on the Internet now. As a genre, wiki sites are growing rapidly. Here are several examples:

  • WikiTravel
  • WikiHow
  • Wiktionary
  • SwitchWiki - a large directory of wikis

3 more annotations...

• Editing in Wikipedia­
  

  When you edit Wikipedia, you do so using something called "Wikitext." For normal paragraphs of text, you simply insert the text. For special features like headings, lists, italics, etc., you use special character combinations. For example, if you place two equals signs at the beginning of a line ("=="), it means that you want to create a heading. To learn the symbols, looked at the page on editing.