What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a website that can be quickly edited by visitors to produce a kind of collaborative website. Any user can add entirely new pages or add new content to exisiting pages as well as change or delete existing information. The administrator of a wiki can decide whether to make the site public and able to be viewed by anyone or private and viewable only to selected individuals and can also determine who will be allowed to edit the wiki. Wikis will save the history of the changes made which allows you to easily retrieve older versions of your content. Much like blogs, you do not need to know HTML, Dreamweaver, etc. to use a wiki. You can make your wiki viewable to only staff or to the public at large regardless of who is authorized to edit it. Wikis can become disorganized easily if there is not already a plan in place for how pages will be named and how content will be added. A simple outline should be enough to orient your users as shown here: http://instructionwiki.org/Style_Guide
When Should I Use a Wiki?
Wikis are great for collaborating and storing information which does not lose value over time. Some of the ways in which they can be used include:
How Can I Start a Wiki?
There are many hosted wikis available, most of which have free versions and a number of fee-based versions. These include PBWiki and Seedwiki. Often, free versions come with ads and limited flexibility and the fee-based versions are reasonably priced. Still, it is recommended that you try out a free version first and see if it fits your needs. In general, you can upgrade your free wiki to a fee-based one at any time.
Wiki Setup Guide
Creating Your Wiki
- Go to PBWiki and enter your wiki name (ex. “nela.pbwiki.com”), your email address, and select your purpose (for libraries, this should be “for education”) and then click on “Create my wiki”.
- You’ll then be prompted to check your email for message from PBWiki which will provide a link so that you can finish creating your wiki and set your wiki's password. If you do not see it, be sure to check your junk mail.
- Choose your password and decide whether you would like this wiki to be public or private. Public means that anyone can see your wiki and private means that it is not accessible to the public. Ineither case, the password is always needed to edit your wiki. It is recommended that you make your wiki private while setting it up and then you can change it to public.
- Choose editor type: classic or point-and-click. If you are comfortable with HTML, you may want to use the classic editor. Otherwise, point-and-click is probably best. Editor type can be changed at any time.
- Select the free version of the wiki. If you would like to upgrade later, the option will be there.
Adding Content
- Now you’re ready to start adding content. Click on “Edit page” to change the text of your front page.
- To create a new page, click on “New page”, select a template, and type in your content.
- New pages can be added to the sidebar for easy access. To do this, click on “SideBar” and then on “edit”. Type in the title of your new page, highlight it, and click on “Link”. When a box opens up, “Link Type” should be WikiPage, “Link to wiki page” should be set to the title of your new page. You would use this same process to make links to websites. If you want to link to a website be sure to change “Link Type” to URL.
Changing Settings
- Settings: Ths section will allow you to change the wiki’s title, description and contact email as well as make changes to number of other features.
- Skins: will offer several different themes from which to choose.
- Users: allows you to invite people to contribute to your wiki. For the time being, you could simply give them your password and they could log in with that alone. However, if you sign up for a free PBWiki account, you can then invite others. The advantage to doing it this way is that you will be able to tell who made what changes.
- Notifications: controls whether and how often you are told that changes were made to your wiki
- Publicize your wikis: enables you to add tags to your wiki so that the public might find it easier
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.