What sort of things can I do with a wiki?
The most famous example of a wiki is ![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
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.
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 ![[wikipedia]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/inter.png){kind=small}
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 knowledge about. Together, everyone's knowledge becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Bad ideas
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:
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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.
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Some dude you knew in college - what was his name, anyway?
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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.
Deciding on a name
Once you have a topic, decide on a short name that identifies your wiki. Your wiki's short name will appear in the URL as well as in links to your wiki, so make it simple, short, and related to your topic. For example, good names might be fresno-ca.wikispot.org, aspergers.wikispot.org, or sf.wikispot.org. Once you've decided on a name, you can type it into the form at the bottom of this page. Note that the short name cannot contain spaces and can only have the letters a-z and the '-' character.
You will be able to choose a longer, more descriptive title for your wiki once it is created, but the short name will always identify your wiki in certain ways.
You may also use other domains to point to your wiki, which do not need to include wikispot within the address, such as daviswiki.org (i.e., davis.wikispot.org) for Davis Wiki. Create your wiki first, then check out our information on using a domain name.
You probably shouldn't include the word "wiki" in the short name of your wiki — that's already implied by the "wikispot.org" in your address!
Getting it going!
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First, make sure you're logged in to Wiki Spot and that the email address in your user settings is correct. To create an account, simply
go here.
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Take a look at our Community Guidelines page to make sure your idea doesn't conflict with our mission.
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Just enter the short name of your wiki in the box below and press "Create Wiki" to create a wiki for your community:
You must be logged in to create a wiki! To create an account, go here.
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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.
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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
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Wiki Creator Guide — some basics to read over after you've first created a wiki
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Customizing wikis — make your community feel at home
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Help for Wiki Administrators — how to's for being an admin on a wiki
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Help with Editing — general editing help
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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!
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
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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
2008-09-18 16:01:23 This site is great! —64.9.33.163
2008-11-13 14:38:35 how about dick? and sex? —123.243.129.144
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If that's your community focus, although it would still have to obey copyright law. For instance, just posting pictures found around the net is a bad idea (they aren't yours to legally use). An erotic stories writers group would make sense, or a wiki about the swinger community or leatherman community in a given city would make perfect sense. Sex is part of many communities, and the focus of some. If you're still concerned, what are you envisioning? —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards
2009-01-04 23:18:01 Im gonna make a MHF2 wiki (monster hunter freedom 2) —87.227.38.111
