Geek Site of the Week

Wiki farms

November 13, 2006

Recently in October Wiki farm/host JotSpot was bought by Google!  It’s finally time that wiki technology and the medium get mainstream attention so this week I’m promoting the array of wiki information formats and online applications available for you to access. Linked this week is a list of wiki hosting services, or wiki farms as they are called, as listed by the grand wiki of supposedly non-fiction information, Wikipedia. As far as which wiki farm to go with, there are apparently many choices and they range from free (supported by Google text ads) to $10 a month and beyond into the enterprise level, with more privacy being available if you pay more.

Wikis are collaborative, instantly editable, ever-evolving and changing websites that are powered by PHP, MySQL and similar technologies. A wiki can be about any topic just like a normal website, but what makes them ingenious is that (most) viewers are often welcomed to contribute on the spot and do anything from correct spelling to write new pages without asking as long as you stay within basic respectful guidelines for your behavior. It’s a shared, interactive experience that transcends passive media. The computer world, especially the Internet, is about interactivity and wikis provide that. They draw on the power of the community and split the burden and task of creating the website and keeping it up to date/expanding it amongst the whole public, spreading the work out exponentially more than can be expected in any other technology and doing it quickly and constantly. Being part of a wiki is fun and rewarding because each user feels they can make a difference and personalize the wiki, but there’s often very little pressure and commitment so, if you choose, everything you do is voluntary and on your own schedule though others may beat you to the punch on posting information and making changes you intend to.

There’s so many choices of which wiki to read, or more correctly put, join. Notable ones are Memory Alpha for Star Trek factoids and trivia, Wikipedia which is part of a family of extremely, extremely large amounts of very organized web pages of a non-fictional reference nature, and the fun Uncyclopedia which is a fake encyclopedia and is hilarious, especially if you like dark comedy. Any comedian can contribute to the latter but other users and administrators remove comedy that isn’t creative enough and have a guideline defining what makes comedy that can stay on the website but otherwise it’s a free for all of the stupidest, most silly jokes and gags made by people from all around Earth. My friend loves it and we had a blast sharing links between it though we didn’t edit any jokes ourselves yet. Uncyclopedia is already doing a great job themselves---they being the more than, one would guess, hundreds of people working on it.

Wikipedia is a very handy reference site and if you don’t want to write for the Wikipedia and its sister sites but still have knowledge to share with the world you can start your own niche encyclopedia like Memory Alpha did for Star Trek fans. Anything weird is fine and encouraged. There’s a very, very diverse range of wikis---many thousands of them. It’s amazing how quickly the wiki phenomena has taken off; in just a few years these generally not-for-profit, decentralized, almost (but for sure not totally) non-hierarchical wikis have grown so large and yet still managed not to fail due to technical difficulties thanks very often in part to open source technology and donations of huge amounts of tweaking, design, and maintenance work by computer professionals in their free time.

The information table linked from this article will lead you to such wiki farms as pbwiki.com, the peanut butter wiki site. PBwiki defines its product, its own version of a blank, ready-to-edit wiki, as “an easy-to-use web page that multiple people can edit. It’s as easy to make as a peanut butter sandwich. Take a tour.”

The best news in my opinion is that Apple is finally coming out with a wiki server in OS X Leopard Server edition. I eagerly anticipate it’s drag and drop add image feature (yes you can have other media than text on a wiki, especially photos with captions and the ability to offer high resolution as an option by clicking on the image to show a bigger file). I hope it works in intranet mode too. Some wikis are meant to be private like a personal journal and you can also, in some wiki implementations and service tiers, add encryption and password locks. I’m hoping Apple will not only make wikis even easier but even more secure so families can use wikis for their grocery lists and organizational needs with a reasonable sense of privacy.

So this time’s Geek Site of the Week has a good chance of being valuable to you because wiki farms and wikis in general are treasure chests of unregulated but bountiful hints at the information you are answer and can often link you to professionally researched material that you can cite in school and work. Please think more about the uses of wikis and explore the wikis out there some more, and don’t hesitate to contribute back or eventually even make your own, if only for the experience of interactive online website making. A lucky few of you who have the technical prowess and patience, don’t have to wait for Leopard to come out and can, for free, install a very powerful MediaWiki server on your Mac with instructions found on the following wiki entry: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Running_MediaWiki_on_Mac_OS_X It’s worth noting that technical advice and writing, installation guides, and user manuals are now found in many places in wiki style, even if published only by a select few authors behind the product.

P.S. Also check out the wiki from MacRumors found at http://guides.macrumors.com/

Update 11-13-06: $5/month wiki service run by young 20-something.  E-mail exchange below:

“Yes, it is possible to host wiki’s on the personal hosting package. As an example of a wiki that has no data in it you can visit http://wiki.t35.com. For images we have the GD library installed which can easily make thumbnails out of images. If you would like any more information please feel free to reply to this message.

Bret Craven
Vice President
T35 Hosting - www.t35.com
cravenbw@t35.net “

It’s worth noting T35.com gives away pretty much unlimited free hosting in general that is support by ads.  I read about them in Business Week.