Wetpaint is nearing an amazing milestone -- one million wikis! To celebrate this occasion, Wetpaint will reward the one-millionth site creator with the chance to give back to their community and the planet! For one year, Wetpaint will offset the carbon emissions of both the home and car of the creator of the millionth wiki. Wetpaint will also sponsor the carbon offset of a local school or non-profit organization selected by the lucky millionth site creator. Wetpaint is even taking it one step further by offering the package to the referrer of the millionth site, if it's created as a referral generated by an email or a website.
Could your new wiki be the millionth wiki on Wetpaint? Have you been thinking about creating a wiki on the Web? Maybe one for your family, your child's team, your hobby, your favorite TV show, your favorite team, your favorite charity, etc.? Why not create a wiki today on Wetpaint. If your site is the millionth wiki, you'll help the planet Earth plus help a selected local school or non-profit organization. I'd love to be the referrer of the millionth wiki on Wetpaint!!
If you want to know more about wikis, visit the Everything Wiki site. Then, just click on the "start a wiki" link that is displayed at the bottom right corner of any page. If you're ready now, you can create your free website from this blogpost.
Today on Father's Day, I cannot help but recognize the father of wiki, Ward Cunningham
Wikis are great tools for web-based content management and collaboration. They easily allow a community to collaborate and jointly create and edit content. The first wiki was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a Smalltalk developer, who conceived it as a quick way to create and share ideas when working. The first public wiki, called the Portland Pattern Repository, facilitates the discovery and discussion of software patterns. Ward's Wiki is still working today. In fact, on its tenth anniversary, it had over 30,000 pages! His site has a lot more information about the history of Wiki.
Most wikis today are really not their father's wiki though. There's been a lot of progress in the world of wiki since Ward Cunningham created the first. Some note key differences from the original wiki concept and often reference Wiki 2.0. The early wikis required technical expertise during their setup -- often requiring customization of open source code. Wikis were initially customized and installed by people with key technical skills and authorities. These individuals would often be labeled as techies, geeks, or nerds by some. After wikis were created, the community members often had to learn a simple, text formatting language, called wikitext or wiki syntax. The early wikis could be updated by anyone, with little to no protection of any pages. You could see the history of changes and revert content, but there was really no option to lock or to protect a page's content. Today, wiki hosting services permit the quick and easy creation of wikis on the Web. There are no technical requirements or expertise needed to create a wiki on the Web using a wiki hosting service. Hundreds of thousands of wikis exist today -- and most were not developed by individuals with technical skills. Most wiki hosting services support a rich text editor and provide a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) interface for its users. In other words, no tags! Wiki users are not required to learn or to use a text formatting language at all. If you can send e-mail or create a document with a word processing software package, you can create a wiki. The early wikis were primarily text-based sites, with many hyperlinks easing the view of related information. Today's wikis support templates and creative site designs, include multimedia, and permit widgets or small applications to be embed, permitting interactivity and dynamic content. Many wiki hosting services allow a creator to protect the content for selected pages and some wikis allow authorizations at the page level. Many wiki hosting services have enhanced community features, permitting its members to create profiles, to send messages to other members, to send compliments to others, and to identify their associations or friendships with other members. The wiki -- a truly great idea -- is continuing to evolve and open the Web to the nontechnical users.
Here are two very short videos by Wetpaint which discuss some of the differences between the original wiki implementation and the ease of creating wikis today on wiki hosting services.
Today, don't be old-school -- give wiki a try, but start with a wiki hosting service, like Wetpaint, to experience the true ease and power of wikis today.
Today marks the end of the reign of the great Wiki Queen. Susan Cline announced today that she is officially relinquishing her Wiki crown and stepping down from the throne. She shut down her EduWikiTorial wiki, which has been a valuable resource for many educators as an introduction to wikis and how wikis can be used in learning. Susan kindly endorsed to her community this Wiki'd Ways blog and the Everything Wiki site as resources for information about wikis. I welcome the EduWikiTorial community here on Wiki'd Ways and at Everything Wiki. Through this blog and the wiki, my goal is to describe the easy ways to build web content and collaborate with your community by using wikis -- a shared common purpose with Susan and her wiki. I also encourage you to visit Wiki'd Places, where I hope you will share with me examples of how you're using wikis in education and learning.
Welcome to my blog.
Everyday is a gift and worthy of celebration. I enjoy blogging and hope that you visit my blogs on celebrating life, cake decorating with cut-up cake patterns (that I created), opinion research, making wikis, and wiki'd places to visit on the web. Hopefully you'll find something that interests, amuses, or informs you. Brighten my day: post a comment and share this blog!
