Life on Florida’s West Coast

Creating a Wiki is Easy

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I have a mailing list for this website I created that is a clearing house for free hair bow instructions. The mailing list is getting close to 1200 members and a majority of them are very active on a daily basis. You can only imagine the amount of e-mail this generates. It is my opinion that using a mailing list to keep this group of people together is not the most streamlines way to go about things.

Since my members upload a lot of pictures, sets of step-by-step instructions, and tips about the crafting industry, I was thinking that a great way to better organize all of the information coming in and still give my members a way to participate heavily would be to add a wiki to my website. A wiki is user-generated set of web pages. You can set the permissions and anyone can make additions and edits. All of the changes are logged so that accountability is present. Your users can add entire pages of information, photos, videos, links,

WetPaint is a site that allows you to create a free wiki. They’ll even host it for you. You can’t knock a freebie that won’t even tax your own server account. Although I would eliminate the dynamic e-mail list I currently use, the free wiki has a discussion forum on it that members can use to interact and comment. It would make finding old information much simpler and organization would upgrade considerably. I have also been looking at other Wetpaint wikis that have chat rooms and blogs. This is a highly nteractive way to bring a group of people with the same interests together.

Now, nothing is really absolutely free you know. There are contextual ads on the pages and links to other Wetpaint Wikis. This is something you can have waived if you are using the wiki in an educational setting and can qualify for the removals. I think this is a GREAT tool for teachers. A classroom wiki is a super way to engage children in learning about collaborative efforts through technology. Technology and children are like catnip and cats, so the draw will be strong.

Wikis are gaining momentum. If you’ve done a search on any given topic lately, you have probably noticed that wiki pages tend to come out near the top of your search results. If you want to bypass all of the irrelevant search results that search engines like Google spit out at you, you can use Qwika. It simply searched through all of the wikis on the net. How cool is that?

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