Friday, September 7, 2012

wikis

This past summer I noticed a handful of unpublished posts still sitting on this blog. After going back and forth, I decided not to dither any longer but to either purge or publish. This is the first one I looked at. If memory serves, I was waiting to incorporate some additional material but never got round to it...so now, a full year (!) later, it is just going out as found:

Some time back I started compiling a list of all the interesting wiki pages I ran into, thinking...well, I don't know what I was thinking, really.

My interest was probably piqued because I live in a place which generated one of the earliest city wikis:
Davis, California
There are several more city wikis—and of course, where better to find a list than good old Wikipedia:
largest city wikis
A lot of wikis are hosted on Wikia: Harry Potter, The Office, Lord of the Rings, camerascoffee, vintage sewing patterns, to name just a few. Pick a popular movie, a game, or a tv show, and see if you can't find it here.

Homeschooling? Try Wikijunior or Wikiversity.

Interested in the world and its people? There's Wikitravel, Nativewiki, and one whose name made me laugh when I first stumbled across it: Sikhiwiki.

Like anyone reading this, I suppose, we use the computer for a lot of instant research. And let me add that I'm aware there is controversy over the dependability of the web in general, and wikis in particular, as reliable information content. But with appropriate caution in place, we've had fun wandering the stacks of these wikis when a particular question arose relating to:
Audio Recording
Chickens
iPhones
James Bond
Knitting
Minecraft
Second Life
Tea
I have even started two wikis in the past: a general wiki for our local homeschooling group, and a specific class wiki when some of our kids were learning about countries of the world together. Wikis are a great community learning tool, given that their very nature is based upon community input; but they are dependent upon people being willing to learn to use the site and taking time to share their knowledge, whatever it may be. Here are a few sites that let you create your own wiki:
Google Sites
PBworks
Wetpaint
Wikidot
Wikisite
Wikispaces
Zohowiki
If you have a hosted site already, you can also use software to create a wiki:
DokuWiki
MediaWiki
MoinMoin
PMWiki
TikiWiki
My favorite wikis, however, are not information wikis but project wikis. What's better than to see cool things that people have made themselves?
Instructables
Make Projects
How about you? What are your favorite wikis?

5 comments:

  1. So glad you went for publish rather than purge!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tiddlywiki. Ace for text based projects, lots of plugins and fun to use.

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  3. Wiki Wacky Wonderful! My first encounter with the word 'wiki' was when we had to take the WikiWiki (meaning quick quick!) shuttle bus at the Honolulu airport in the late 1980's. I learned that this word apparently inspired computer programmer Ward Cunningham to name his software WikiWikiWeb (1994), and this went on to
    become the first wiki. I echo Lisa's sentiments above!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Wiki_Shuttle
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the encouragement--maybe I'll pull the other posts out of limbo, as well.

    And I didn't know anything about Tiddlywiki, so special thanks for that mention. I've pulled up a few pages on it and am looking & learning right now...

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  5. Yay!! I knew you should publish and not purge : )
    (I haven't thought about the WikiWiki in such a long time! I loved that!! I think I might need to reinvent that in my current life... that's too good... hmmm...)

    ReplyDelete

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