March 17, 2005

Curious George: Wiki I have recently downloaded wxWikiServer, which happily runs on my desktop. But I wonder what I can do with a wiki, apart from create a new Wikipedia. Can the monkeys point me at exemplary wikis, to give me a clue?
posted by Skrik 19 years ago
  • You can use it for project management...me, I've been running one at work to build a departmental knowledge base. I bet you could write a crazy experimental novel with it, too.
  • Kind of depends on what you want to do with it. Duplicating the efforts of someone else is kind of pointless, when you could just contribute to the original project. This sounds like a solution in search of a problem, sort of thing.
  • Drivingmenuts wins! I was thinking of writing with it, because of the version control capability, but then I realised that there must be a world of wikis I know little to nothing about. What ELSE can I do with it. I won't be replicating other people's work; merely garnering ideas for my own twisted imagination to work with.
  • There's also the idea of a MoFi Online CDX Wiki that a few of us on #mofirc have been tossing around. (self link, obviously) There has been some talk on #mofirc of morphing this into an (unofficial) MoFi Wiki. However, IIRC, monkeybashi was against the idea of having a Wiki. Besides, everyone's been too busy to actually take the first step.
  • One thing which someone mentioned to me, and which is brililant, is that instead of blogging or livejournaling or diarying, you make a Wiki of your life.
  • I can't find the URL in my bookmarks anymore, but around xmas I stumbled on a wiki that was a Spanish tutoring tool.
  • One of my insanely geeky hobbies has a fairly new wiki which, to my knowledge, primary lets other insanely geeky hobbyists keep one another up to date on technical details and codec/software releases and things. Apparently the system works for them. (I haven't gotten into it yet, myself.) I think it would be cool to write collaborative stories with it, myself - linking together the person who passes by in scene 6 of story A to the protagonist of story B - but I'm a dork.
  • No, I like that idea, Wurwilf. The problem I have with it is the implementation. There's always someone in a collaborative writing project who kills off the other person's characters before their time. I hate that.
  • Sensei's library, for Go. I'm going to use a private wiki for my job, using pmwiki. The plan is to use it to take notes, write bits of code I'd like to be able to track back quickly etc. So in this case, I'm not using the collaborative side of it but just the easiness of editing.
  • Casuistry: That would be fantastic if you committed to keeping the categories static and updating them over time - Job, Partner, Self-Image. One could see the evolution of self over time.
  • I use a wiki for the encyclopedia for my play-by-email rpg. It's been useful for building information over time because it's easy to add new stuff and to edit old stuff. I know people who are using desktop wikis to track similar information for their novels. These guys are using a wiki to play Universalis (an RPG). I think drivingmenuts has nailed it: use a wiki as a tool to do something. If you don't have a need for it, don't use it.
  • fuyu, I've been reconsidering the wiki idea for MoFi, mostly because #2 is keen to play around with different ones and he's managed to halfway convince me. Then, too, we could use it in the same way as Mefi's Wiki, if someone was happy to maintain it and keep it as spam-free as possible. We (#2 and I) used to have a Wiki that was used to keep track of and in contact with other people from our year at the university Halls of Residence. We're hoping to use it to organise an informal ten-year reunion this year. Still have it lying around on the server somewhere, probably...
  • For a while I used a wiki to collect info on Based on True Story movies. But I didn't update it enough so it got erased (it was on a free wikifarm host). I still think it's a good idea to have such info gathered in one place. I had another idea for a wiki but I forgot what it was. If I remember it, I'll let you know.
  • Another interesting one: Lawrence Lessig is re-writing his book Code using a wiki. [via]
  • China Study Group use a wiki to collaborate on translations of contemporary Chinese fiction.
  • Wikis are really neat. I'm just learning their true potential. My favorite wiki design is TiddlyWiki Skrik, is there a particular topic that you'd like to collaborate with others? P.S. Go rocks! thanks.
  • Tiddly is rather interesting, Rx. Monkeyfilter: merely garnering ideas for my own twisted imagination
  • Mm, Tiddlywiki looks like fun. It's hard to imagine a wiki without a server-side backend, but I can see how he pulls it off. The adaptation with PHP server-side might be cool to play with too.
  • A friend of mine is using a Wiki as a research aid for writing her thesis. She can quickly write out thoughts with links between important concepts and external links to papers. She can edit it from anywhere, and this way the data is on a remote server which avoids the problem of laptop deaths and misplaced papers.
  • Some good ideas here. Thanks, all. What would I like to cooperate on? Dunno is the simple answer. I'm thinking of learning about Go, though.
  • Wikis are good whenever you want to contribute, with a bunch of other people, to information on a particular topic, and share that information with each other, and other random people that stop by. You can make a wiki for a hobby, if there isn't one around yet. Or make a wiki for your local area, talking about history, things to do, etc. Wikis are good for mmorpg guild sites too, where any member can post something they can craft for others to a page, and guild raids/events to another page, etc.