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How to Use a Wiki for Your Start-up Meeting
Leo Romero, host of a start-up meeting in the Silicon Valley area of California, used a wiki with his group for sharing information and collaboration. Below, he offers his advice for using a wiki and choosing your wiki hosting site. And be sure to see Leo's step-by-step instructions for setting up a wiki of your own.
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What is a wiki and what are the benefits of setting one up?
A wiki is a website that allows users to add, remove, and otherwise edit and change content. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. Each article has a discussion page where editors can talk about the document. And by looking at the history of a page, users can track changes, and compare the versions of a document. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing.
- "While there are a plethora of collaborative tools and technologies available today, what makes the wiki so interesting is that it is the most radically open of all tools, enabling anyone to change anyone else's content in mere seconds. Therefore, it very quickly gets at the heart of the human, social challenges to managing and creating knowledge."
– Elizabeth Albrycht, Thinking About Wikis, New Communications Review
Silicon Valley start-up meeting
Are there any potential problems or disadvantages?
The biggest enemy of any open wiki is vandalism. Many good wikis have shut down because it takes too much time to reverse the damage that vandals and spammers cause. For this reason, it makes sense to use a host that has robust controls and an active community that guards against abuse.
How did you encourage people to participate?
I just let people know that if they want to use the wiki they can, and pointed them to Help documents and other resources.
We're just beginning to appreciate what wikis can do. Members of our Silicon Valley group used the wiki to give brief self-introductions, to post their notes and feedback on our start-up meeting, and to post their notes from meetings of the organizers.
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Free wiki sites
You can start your own wiki using one of the following free hosting services.
Based on the MediaWiki engine, will be familiar for anyone who's ever contributed to Wikipedia (which also uses MediaWiki). Appropriate for projects that are open to the public.
Also based on the MediaWiki engine. You can create public wikis, but also private wikis and specify which types of changes registered users can make.
This service allows you to create a free, ad-supported wiki that you or others at your organization can edit. Upgrading to a paid subscription (starting at $5 per month) does provide greater control over user permissions.
StikiPad provides free, ad-supported wikis that can be made public or private. Editing pages is as easy as using an ordinary word processor.
Founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, Wikia hosts more than 2,000 wikis, including Silicon Valley Commons, home of the Idealist Silicon Valley group. Appropriate for projects that are open to the public. See Leo's detailed instructions for starting a Wikia wiki.
Creating a free, ad-supported account at Wikispaces gets you 2GB of storage space and support for an unlimited amount of users, though this option will only let you create public or protected wikis.
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Instructions
To start a wiki using Wikia, follow these simple instructions provided by Leo, host of a start-up meeting in Silicon Valley, CA, and initiator of the Silicon Valley Commons wiki.
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