Wiki Play Space

A wiki is best for true community collaboration web site, where members will add, delete, change web pages.  A wiki will also allow readers to add comments to the bottom of a page (as a separate function from editing pages).

If you only want comments from readers and not community editing of the web site, consider using a blog instead. There are many free blogs services. 

Wikis can be a good choice even if you are not planning a high amount of interativity with your community:

- Templates provided to make nice looking pages without doing the design task
- Page-level access control (turn on and off comments, or ability to edit or view)
- All version saved for all pages: can revert to an earlier version of a page
- See differences between versions easily
- Make access private (i.e. require a password to get into site)

Things to consider when choosing a wiki:

- hosted
- WYSIWYG
- free?
- private?
- ad-free?
- RSS feed?
- advanced capabilities like support for Javascript?

Read all about wikis by searching on Wikipedia!!! Here is the entry for "Wikis": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikis

This free wiki service uses the same wiki engine as wikipedia: EditThis.info
I haven't tried this wiki service, but it looks promising. Let us all know with a comment how it works for you.

Play around with this wiki

1. Create and point to a new page from here like this:

        a. In edit mode (page/Edit), create and point to a new page called PageAboutDogs using "WikiWords" or words in Title Case without spaces between the words. Enclose the WikiWords (i.e. the page title) in double brackets [[ ]]. The correct result of creating the bracketed WikiWords will be this: Page About Dogs after you save the edited page.

        b. Create a page called Page About Cats by hitting "Page Create", adding and saving content, then going back to this page and link it to Page About Cats by going into Page/Edit mode, highlighting name and using Link (chain icon) on second line middle of editing menu

 2. Add a comment to the bottom of this page or of the new page you created

 3. Check out Page/Versions and look at Diff

 4. Note difference between Page/Edit and Menu/Edit

 5. Upload and attachment from the local computer with Page/Attachments

 6. Link the attachment the same way you linked a page in 1.b. above

 7. Play around with the rest of the wiki functions and see what happens. Go back to a previous version of a page by going to Page/Versions, clicking on the old version, edit it, then save it. (It then becomes the latest version again.)

 8. Follow the pointer at left menu bottom to online help, and learn about advanced topics like how to change skins, how to use Javascript, and other topics.