You probably already know about Wikipedia, but you might not know that a Wiki is a CMS that you can develop and customize.  You need to install the Wiki on your domain, like you might do with Wordpress, but the result is a database of information that anyone can add to.  Lots of individual Wiki’s exist.  Games like Fallout 3 or Minecraft use them to catalog important items or quest information.  The popular television series Game of Thrones also has an extensive community wiki (same with many other shows). 

Requirements for a Wiki

You’ll need to have your own hosting service.  Some hosting services have a Cpanel with built in applications like Wiki’s, but most wiki’s can be installed via a third party website.  MediaWiki is probably the most popular; as it is the model that Wikipedia was built on.  It is Open Source and built with PHP. 

You’ll need command line access to your server (Apache or IIS) and PHP version 5.2.3 or later installed on your domain.  You’ll also need MySQL 4.0 or later.  Once you have the download of MediaWiki uploaded to your server, direct your browser to that address and follow the onscreen prompts to get started. 

You can also install it from a memory stick if you need to.

Wiki Uses

You can use Wiki’s for all sorts of reasons:

• You can use a Wiki to compile information about your company including personnel (like executives) and product information.  Everything would be very easy to search and index.
• Gamers can track quests and information from the games they play
• Multiple users can edit a document, introducing new changes based on new research that arrives

MediaWiki Tricks

Media Wiki has a lot of useful tricks to help you develop your community and keep track of the information database you’re building.  You can export individual pages as XML files, useful for archiving, and you can easily backup and restore your database should anything go wrong. 

You can also add your own logo using this very simple command. 

Final Thoughts

While building a wiki can take time and lots of effort, if you install a wiki now you can focus on adding information to it a little bit at a time.   If you’re topic is popular, it should be easy to get friends to add to the knowledge, but you’ll want to make sure you set guidelines for good writing.  Wikipedia has some great article writing tips to help you get started!

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