Create a wiki - Wiki Spot

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What is a wiki? | Good ideas for a wiki | Bad ideas for a wiki | Next steps

Wiki Spot is different — we're a nonprofit, member-supported effort dedicated to helping communities use wikis. We gladly provide a home to all projects that meet our Community Guidelines.

Create a wiki:

Wiki Spot is a non-profit, public-benefit organization and we require that your wiki meet our Community Guidelines.

Wiki Spot will send an e-mail to the account that you are logged on with. That email will have a simple link in it that will let you create a wiki. You'll find lots of further instructions and links to help pages on your new wiki's front page.

What is a wiki?

A "wiki" is an interlinked set of Web pages written by the people who use it: the beauty of a wiki is that anyone can edit and contribute. Wiki Spot is a nonprofit, member-supported effort dedicated to helping communities use wikis.

The most famous example of a wiki is wikipedia, an encyclopedia written entirely by its users. Of course, creating another encyclopedia of everything would be counterproductive; however there are plenty of other applications for wikis! Think of the wiki as a versatile medium than can be used for many applications.

Rather than creating a wiki for the sake of wikis, you should be creating a wiki to fulfill a need that you already have. The best potential wikis are those that have a community of people who would contribute.

Good ideas for a wiki

The most famous example of a wiki is wikipedia, an encyclopedia written entirely by its users. Of course, creating another encyclopedia of everything would be counterproductive; however, there are plenty of other applications for wikis! Think of the wiki as a versatile medium than can be used for many applications.

City Wiki

How about a wiki about your town — wouldn't it be great to have a comprehensive guide to everything to do and see in your town? A wiki can be more accurate and up-to-date than other resources because anyone at any time can improve it. City wikis can be a great resource for the people in the city where you live. A shining example of this is the Davis Wiki, a wiki made by the residents of Davis, California about their town. Whereas a Wikipedia page about dogs would have information about the diet, health, reproduction and history of man's best friend, the Davis Wiki page on dogs has valuable information about owning a dog in Davis such as where the dog parks are, a list of groomers, veterinarians and other service providers in the area, as well as a list of apartment complexes that allow dogs.

Common-interest wiki

A wiki can bring together any community, even one where community members don't live in the same geographic area. Suppose you play the ukulele. While wikipedia has a generic page on ukuleles, mostly about the history of the ukulele. An ukulele wiki could put ukulele players from across the world in contact with each other, allowing them to share advice, upload audio samples, show photos of instruments, discuss current trends in ukuleleing, share their favorite artists, and meet up with other ukulele enthusiasts in the area. Perhaps you can think of a person/place/thing/event a group of people can contribute their knowdege about. Together, everyone's knowledge becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Bad ideas for a wiki

The goal of a wiki is to create a collaborative resource for a community, therefore a wiki that has too narrow of a focus is a bad idea. While wikispot is free of charge, creating a wiki uses CPU and hard drive space, which do cost money. Creating useless wikis taxes useful ones. Here are some topics that do not fit the criteria:

Yourself — unless you're Paris Hilton, no one will visit or edit this wiki. If you are Paris Hilton, perhaps you might want to consider donating.
Some dude you knew in college - what was his name, anyway?
My dog — awww he's sooo cute! Maybe it would be better to create a wiki for a group of dogs!

Wiki Spot is a non-profit, public-benefit organization, and we require that your wiki meet our Community Guidelines.

Next steps

Start creating pages! Have Fun! To create a new page, simply search for the name of the page you wish to create and then click the "Create a new page with this title" link. Another way to create a new page is by making a link to the page you wish to create from a page that already exists, following the link, and clicking "Create this page."

As you develop your site further, look at some of our other help pages:

Wiki Creator Guide — some basics to read over after you've first created a wiki
Customizing wikis — make your community feel at home
Help for Wiki Administrators — how to's for being an admin on a wiki
Help with Editing — general editing help
Building Community — building a successful wiki takes time and effort. Building community will likely be your most important challenge after building up a certain amount of seed content.

If you like what we do around here, consider donating to help keep Wiki Spot running and awesome!

Ideas, Questions and Suggestions!

Note: You must be logged in to add comments

2007-10-20 03:47:36 How about a "family wiki"? I'm thinking of "running one up a flag pole" with my extended family and seeing if "anyone salutes"! Hey! If it catches on we may have thousands of "family wikis" linking us together all the way back to Noah! May need some "family wiki" guidelines though. eg "No fair criticizing deceased family members—they can't defend themselves!" —RichLindvall

2007-10-27 17:10:42 Is anybody thinking of mixing some features of social networking sites with the nonprofit wiki idea? I know tons of people would want to join a non-commercialized social network. The family thing could be worked in I bet, too. I live in Davis and I'm trying to get a project like this going! People tell me the compliance (lawyer-related) costs would be too much to do it non-profit — does anybody know if that's reasonable to believe?

Here are some thoughts on how it would work. —Charles Lang

2007-12-27 08:42:17 Ok I feel really stupid, but I didn't know what to use as my username when i tried to set up my profile. The instructions aren't really that specific and I'm not that familiar with what other people were using. I thought that when I permanently disabled the profile that it would just be deleted and I'd be able to set up another username with the same email address, but that's not the case. Is there any way to make this happen? Or can I only set up a wiki profile at this point by creating another email account? —69.89.111.77

No need to feel stupid — you've actually hit a good question. You can't have two accounts with the same email address and you can't log into a disabled account, so you've hit a wall here! If you send me an email containing the email address of your old account I will "clear" it out so it can be used with a new account. My email address is on my page. —PhilipNeustrom

2008-03-05 14:36:59 Hi sorry to bug you, in the new user registration form, what the field Name is supposed to be? Is it username to login, or my wikispot name displayed in the header/window title? Thanks —202.69.98.152

It's your username to login. We use "name" rather than "username" because most communities would like to emphasize usage of real names rather than handles.

2008-03-19 15:59:45 Hello! I would like to create a private wiki for my library system. Our public library would like to use the wiki as a resource for our government-funded organization, though we would like to maintain some privacy since we will be posting some information about staff members here. Does this fit within the community guidelines? Am I able to host a private wiki here?

Thank you! —nmikysa

Yes, that seems great! —PhilipNeustrom

Does this mean that you can host a private wiki? Can you password protect a wiki here?

Yes you can, provided it fits our usual Community Guidelines. See Help for Wiki Administrators.

2008-07-26 18:35:49 Hello! This site looks great. I want to start a wiki on a particular family of board games written from a SPOV (sympathetic point of view). It would be a multi-lingual wiki with as many languages as wanted (starting with about 5-10). Often there would be articles in several languages about the same topic. The articles should be based on "truth", but allow original research. Sometimes a critical article may be written, e.g. about a game (if it is not very well balanced or if it has other known draw backs) and - and that's the touchy matter - about a person (e.g. a game inventor, a researcher) if (a) s/he is a public person; (b) the negative statements can easily be proved on the web (and are proved by providing links) (c) the negative stuff is directly related to board games. This could include disruptive behavior on the web (if a person is notorious for it) or the my-games-are-better-than-everything-else-attitude. These critical articles would be no more than 1-2% of all the articles and are generally discouraged unless they are about something rather well-known. I also would like to allow a wide variety of licenses: public domain, CC, GNU ... Please comment. —MrMancala

Just go ahead and create it. Any rules regarding content are up to you (as long as it follows the Community Guidelines, i.e., isn't purely commercial or illegal where the server is located). If you want advice, that's another thing, but you should feel free to make your own decisions. It's up to your own choice how to grow your wiki's community of editors. If it serves a community, set it up however you want. We're not sticklers (and indeed don't really care) how you handle things like point of view or copyright or openness or any of that — we're here to support your community, not dictate how it should do things. —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards

2009-02-03 17:21:45 I would like to rename our wiki. Our community organization has taken on a new name. Is this possible? I would prefer not to create a new one, and leave the old name dangling in cyberspace. Thanks. Larry O —LawrenceOheron

What's the old name and the new name?

The group is 99% decided on a new name. I am inferring from your question that I can not myself make the change. Pls confirm if my inference is correct and that I must let you know when we are ready. Thanks, Larry O

Well, there are two things going on here. You can change the website's name banner on your Wiki Settings/General and Wiki Settings/Images. However, if you want to change the wiki short name (name.wikispot.org), then you have to ask Philip to change things. We'd just need to know what your current short name is, and the new one you want. —BrentLaabs

Philip, pls make the following changes to our current short name (http://auna-rochesterny.wikispot.org/) to the new name (http://notana-rochesterny.wikispot.org). Thank you. Larry O'Heron

All set!

2009-03-12 12:10:10 Is it a good idea to use a wiki to create groups for my college intranet?Extremely urgent —203.129.195.140

There are plenty of research groups and classes that use Wiki Spot, and a couple of inter-college conferences. Basically, if you are a community of people trying to connect and work together, we're here for you. Welcome to Wiki Spot! —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards

2009-04-17 01:14:59 I have created a Wiki for the Southern Nevada branch of Organizing for America in which we wish to set up a community-based outlet in which we can share information about our contacts, our events, and resources. The commercial site I am now on classifies us as a business when we are a community group. You look interesting. Do you consider us a business or a community group? None of us are paid to do what we do. —72.193.228.232

Paid or not doesn't matter. Are you planning on using the site to make personal profit? If not, don't worry about it. In general, if you're a group of people coming together for a common goal (or you are trying to create a location for a group of people to come together), you're fine. It sounds from the little you've described like you're just the kind of group we're here to support. If you have any questions, just ask; we're a friendly community here on Wiki Spot. —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards

2009-05-09 08:02:24 Would it be okay to create a wiki to use to write a novel collaboratively with a set group of people? —128.120.178.22

That sounds like an interesting project. It sounds like such a project is consistent with our Community Guidelines, so go ahead and create your wiki and get started! —WilliamLewis

2009-10-04 20:38:12 ha wow bout one to help kid with website and computer technology —aheyman

If it's a community, sure. If it's an educational tool, absolutely. If it's a single kid creating a personal website, it might be better elsewhere. But keep in mind that there are communities composed of families here: extended families planning weddings or family reunions. The size of the community isn't an issue. —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards

2009-10-11 15:02:35 I would like to create a wiki dedicated to my homebrew fantasy role-playing game world using the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderrivs license. Is this an appropriate place to do that? —209.105.204.82

Your homebrew fantasy role-playing game world would be an acceptable topic for a wiki here. The only issue I see is that Wiki Spot requires that the wikis we host have an intended community. Wikis are really tools for collaboration and we want to promote collaboration. By using the CC-by-nc-nd license, you are making it legally impossible for anyone other than you to contribute to your wiki, which leaves your wiki with an intended community of one. A community of one is no community at all. If you were to use a CC-by-nc license and encouraged other people to contribute to your wiki, however, we'd be happy to host your wiki. If you have any additional questions or would like clarification of anything I've said, please don't hesitate to ask. —WilliamLewis

Specifically, my purpose was to create a reference for all the players and co-GMs involved in this "world" - it is already a collaborative project, with a small but clearly defined "community" as it is. It is my intent to define a user group with rights to modify the information. The choice of licensing was to prevent giant companies who shall remain nameless from taking and using what we have produced for profit.

Perhaps I misunderstand the freedoms and limitations granted in the CC licenses. Does my choice of license still apply if the work is attributed to the entire contributing group? Is this even possible under such a license?

The community doesn't have to be anyone who wants to create an account. It's perfectly fine if you want to restrict editing to a certain group and not let the entire world edit; a closed community is still a community. As for the license, CC-by-nc seems sufficient to me to prevent commercial exploitation. However, the licensing issue is really not what we're interested in. As long as you can abide by our Community guidelines, we're not going to interfere in how your community is run.

For more information on wiki licensing, check out Choosing a License and Wiki Copyright. Happy editing! —wl

Excellent. Thanks for clearing that up. :)

2009-10-29 09:53:40 I am sorry to bother you. I am having a difficult time registering a new username with a previously disabled e-mail account. I cannot log on nor can I create an account using the e-mail address. What should I do? I am also wondering if username is my name or my e-mail address. Thank you for the help. —76.209.228.72

Try: fill out the log in form with anything. Then click "forgot password". Enter your email address. You should get a password reset email.

2009-11-13 16:35:21 I would like to create a wiki as a source and collaboration page for sustainable community design. We are a business but want to use the wiki not to promote ourselves, but to share our research. Our idea is to bring our collaborators to the wiki and have them share their research as well. Is this an acceptable site under the Community Guidelines? —209.117.99.26

2009-11-18 19:19:10 Can you create a Pony Club Wiki for a local pony club? Thanks!

2009-11-20 17:23:54 hi! can I make a commercial wiki? for business? obviously in a wiki way...interactive ;-) can I? —93.43.17.66

No. Our Community Guidelines prohibit wikis created for commercial gain. If you want to create a wiki using our software on your own webhost, though, you can download it at Project Sycamore. —WilliamLewis

Just Curious, how much does it cost to host a wiki site?

If your community is consistent with our community guidelines, Wiki Spot is free! We do not host commercial customers as that would run counter to our non-profit nature. If you are looking to use our software in a commercial environment, you can download it and use it yourself at project sycamore. If you're interested in how much money it costs to run wiki spot, check out the page on our budget. Donations are always welcome. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them! —WilliamLewis

2010-04-30 16:50:26 My idea - not completly thought through yet - is a wiki with a small number (30?) of commonly used words in different languages for travelers. It would include audio as well as phonetic spelling. I can get about 15 languages from friends and go from there if this is a workable idea. —SusanRobsky

2010-05-27 14:38:24 Is it possible to change the appearance of the Wiki? The blue theme, for example. I need a darker one for my Wiki. Thanks. —Herian

It certainly is possible. See the Themes page for options. Even those themes can be changed further, as they are ordinary CSS files. —BrentLaabs

2010-06-15 20:46:36 *ahem*, when do you create a wiki cause I'm just sitting around reading this —MikeJr

You create a wiki whenever you want. Use the form up above (don't click edit, look a but lower and you'll see a simple short form asking you to provide the shortname of the wiki. Just make sure your concept fits the Community Guidelines, and you're set! You can go to your wiki by visiting http://<your shortname>.wikispot.org. —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards