Wiki: Encyclopedia II - Wiki - Wiki communities

Wiki - Wiki communities

The largest wikis are listed at List of largest wikis and Meatball: Biggest wikis. Today, the English-language Wikipedia is, by far, the world's largest wiki; the German-language Wikipedia is the second-largest, while the other Wikipedias fill many of the remaining slots. Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Wikitravel, World66 and Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base. The all-encompassing nature of Wikipedia is a significant factor in its growth, while many other wikis are highly specialized. Some also have attributed Wikipedia's rapid growth to its decision not to use CamelCase.

Many public wikis are listed at WorldWideWiki: SwitchWiki, which currently lists about 1000 public wiki communities (as of 2004-06-12).

One way of finding a wiki on a subject in which someone is interested is to follow the wiki-node network from wiki to wiki, or one could take a Wiki bus tour: TourBusStop. Wiki terminated domain names are growing in popularity to support specific niches.

For those interested in creating their own wiki, there are many publicly available "wiki farms", some of which can also make private, password-protected wikis. JotSpot, OddWiki, PeanutButterWiki, SeedWiki, Socialtext, WikiCities, and Wikispaces are seven such services; more at List of wiki farms. Wikipolls are also emerging. One site, Opinion Republic, is an experiment to capture public opinion and then converge on the most broadly accepted opinions.

Many wiki communities are private, particularly within enterprises as collaborative software. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications.

For describing related wikis, there exist WikiNodes — pages on wikis describing related wikis. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor wiki is simply a wiki that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate wiki is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Wiki communities", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki