Home

Getting started with wikis

The first step is to consider what kind of wiki you want. Do you want to spark public conversation on a timely issue? Wikipedia or another public wiki is probably the best venue. Do you want a restricted or entirely private conversation on a strategy or document? Then setting up a personalized wiki is probably the best answer.

 

Hosted wikis
Hosted wikis live on a wiki website, for example Wikispaces. Users can control who can view and/or contribute to the wiki. Administrators have some albeit limited ability to format the wiki, and it’s not possible to have a dedicated URL. Example: http://wikiran.wetpaint.com

Wikispaces.com offers very functional hosted wikis. Public and protected (edits restricted) wikis are free. Private wikis cost $5/month. Try setting one up for practice.

  1. Go to www.wikispaces.com. Click on “Make a new space”.
  2. Name your space, and choose the security level. The ‘members and permissions’ link allows you choose whether your page is public, protected or free.
  3. Click on the ‘edit’ link to begin adding content. Note the other tabs. ‘Discussion’ is a space for debate on wiki page content.
  4. Consider adding RSS feeds, photos, etc. to spice up your pages.
Building your own wiki
You can also build a wiki on your own website. There are many platforms to choose from. Some considerations to help you choose the best tool for your needs:
  • Who will contribute to and/or read your wiki? Will it be private or public? If it's open to public contributions, you'll want certain administrative functions and pages like ‘page history’.
  • Do your contributors understand wiki markup language or HTML code? Neither is hard to learn. But you might look for a wiki with WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) functionality - similar to MS Word – if your contributors are entirely unfamiliar with either.
  • What about wiki design and layout? Is the wiki the final product, or will you extract the content and use it in another form? Do you need a really nice looking wiki page, or is minimal design alright? See US Policy World (www.uspw.org) as an example of a nicely formatted wiki installed on an organizational website. See WikIran (http://wikiran.wetpaint.com) as an example of a hosted wiki with attractive but limited formatting.
Although the software to set up a personalized wiki on your website can be free, you’ll still need a designer to modify it to suit your needs.

Public wikis: Wikipedia
Thousands of public wikis discuss as many topics and themes. These might be good places to influence public discussion of an issue.

Let’s take a quick look at how to use the popular public wiki Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia currently features almost 2 million articles in English, and many more in other languages, and is the ninth largest site on the internet.

Browse the site for interesting key words or topics. Try editing the page on your hometown, or an issue you’re working on. Editors don’t need to have a Wikipedia account, although setting one up will link your edits to you (edits made without an account are attributed to IP address).

Wikipedia pages have a basic structure you’ll notice on many wikis. There are four tabs on the top of each page. ‘Main page’ displays current content; ‘discussion’ exposes debate between contributors on content; ‘edit this page’ allows visitors to add or edit content; ‘history’ details edits that have been made to the page. Click ‘edit content’ if you want to contribute to content on a page.

Wiki tips and tricks:
  • The ability to upload embeddable media is critical!
  • Consider the importance of attachments and RSS feeds.
  • ‘Submission by email’ capabilities are often useful.

Considerations
  • Spam. The greatest fear with wikis is that they are easily attacked by spammers. This is not always the case, depending on how public the wiki is. Some sites use sophisticated technologies or an army of volunteer editors to track and control these activities.
  • Be ready to share. A page on a public wiki with unrestricted access like Wikipedia will be viewed and edited by others. Are you really ready to work in an open and collaborative manner? If not, or if you’re writing private content, research various security options.
  • Quality. Many assume that lots of contributors will lead to messy or inaccurate content. This is not the case! Lots of engagement actually encourages quality, as can be seen on Wikipedia and elsewhere.