One of these days, I wish to pursue having a ‘Wiki’ for this website. According to Wikipedia, a Wiki (pronounced weakie), meaning ‘fast’ in Hawaiian language is “a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration”.
Considering that Ward Cunningham, the person who created and named Wiki, installed his creation on an Internet domain way back in March 1995, one may safely say that it wouldn’t have captured widespread imagination of web users but for resounding success of Wikipedia.
Let us see how Wikipedia has become the most-referred online encyclopedia that it is today. When CNN did this study in August 2003, Wikipdia was 132,000-article strong. Today, as of this writing, it has 1,631,978 articles in English alone. Apart from English, Wikipedia has articles in virtually every language of the world, including over 10,000 pages in Bengali.
The reason Wikipedia is now on every web visitors’ lips is because there probably is no topic on which you don’t get some information. But this has happened only after search engines recognized its worth and started ranking high pages from its repository in nearly every search result. 2 things therefore are happening concurrently – the meteoric expansion of Wikipedia articles and search engines’ recognizing them in real time.
Okay, Wikipedia has shown what lots of contents can do to a website. Since Wikipedia is collaborative, meaning anybody can contribute to it, the growth of content is so high. Many people write in Wikipedia if only to create backlinks pointing to their websites, and who doesn’t know what a heavyweight backlink means in Google’s scheme of things!
If you too wish to have a Wiki for your website, why not start exploring how to do in Wikipedia, the biggest Wiki of all!!
You could also tell your readers to play with their own easy, free wiki from places like Socialtext, Peanut Butter Wiki (PB Wiki), Wikidot, and JotSpot.
A good book is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott (Portfolio, 2006).
The stories of collaboration between people from other companies and nations are inspiring.
I see the wiki as team, the blog as solo act. We need both. You could start a free wiki, open it to registered users only (to avoid spam), and link to it from your blog.
Make a wiki on some topic you are excited about, or some area of expertise you lack and need.
Wiki: democratization of web work space.
Appreciate your comment, Steven. I’m a little wary to start a wiki here, if only because a comparison (inevitable, you know) with Wikipedia will make mine listless.
As I look at it, a wiki is a source of knowledge. Will mine (if I start) measure upto it, I’m not sure.