Interwiki Community

While each wiki may offer a great resource for the particular community it is serving, wiki works because it connects people and information together. As a result, your community grows and provides a better resource to people as it becomes linked to other wikis. Because Wiki Spot is home to many of these communities, you can benefit by building community between wikis.

We call this connection between wikis "interwiki." Wiki Spot helps you connect and watch wikis in a few different ways:

These are pages on the hub (this site) to help you find keep track of wikis and search for their content.

• Interwiki Recent Changes lets you keep track of pages on all the wikis you're watching — just click the "watch this wiki" link in the upper right hand corner of any Wiki Spot wiki.
  

• Interwiki Bookmarks keeps track of all of the pages you have bookmarked on all wikis. Just click the "Bookmark" link at the bottom of a page you want to watch.
  

• Interwiki Search provides a way to search all Wiki Spot wikis (you'll probably access this through the Front Page)
  

• Recent Wikis is an automatically generated list of recently created and recently edited wikis.

• Interwiki Links allow you to link directly to other wikis.
  

• Interwiki Map allows you to create interwiki links to non-Wiki Spot wikis (specific to each wiki)

If you have a simple question, but can't find anything in the Help, ask on our FAQ page.

To keep in touch with what's going on Wiki Spot as an organization, consider joining Wiki Spot Talk, an email list for all users of Wiki Spot wikis.

If you have an administrative issue, email us at <contact AT wikispot DOT org>, and we'll try to address the situation as soon as possible.

The Wiki Spot Board of Directors oversees operations and budgeting at the broad scale. If you're interested, you can attend one of our electronic meetings.

On the hub wiki, we have a quite a few pages that can help you in making your wiki successful: Help for Wiki Administrators, Wiki Creator Guide, and most importantly, Building Community.

That said, it doesn't hurt to have a helping hand from those who have built successful communities before. The Gnome Wiki is the headquarters of the wiki gnomes: little helpful creatures that make your wiki more beautiful, organized, and insightful. (There are rumors that these gnomes are actually humans and not 30 cm tall guys with beards and pointy hats, but no conclusive evidence yet.) If you're having trouble coming up with a logo or attracting people to join, the gnomes are there to help.

Davis Wiki was the inspiration for this entire operation, and has the largest amount of pages and content. If you're looking for ideas on what to write about, take a look around this Northern California town.

Also consider Citywiki, which has a repository of useful templates for building a town wiki.

Wiki Spot is powered by its own custom software, Sycamore, which is free software licensed under the GPL. Since we are always working on new features, we are also always looking for people to help improve the wiki software. Exciting things that we're working on now:

• A GUI Editor — edit pages where what you see is what you get.
  

• A new Overview Map — using OpenStreetMap, so you can even edit the map
  

• Semantic Wiki — adding tags to keep pages organized

Have a different idea of what we need? Head over to the Feature Requests page and let us know what your wiki really needs.

To get involved, visit the Project Sycamore wiki, and sign up for the sycamore-dev mailing list.

There might be a time when you can get your site mentioned in local media, and they want to find out more about Wiki Spot. We'd be happy to discuss the wiki; just drop us an email at <contact AT wikispot DOT org>

We're still working on getting official word from the IRS about our nonprofit 501(c)3 status. In the meantime, we are working on a server upgrade, so we do need money to ensure that Wiki Spot remains lightning fast into the future. If you're interested in helping maintain all of the wikis in our community, and ensuring that we remain forever ad-free, please consider Donating to our community.

If you're curious to see how we spend our money, check out our budget.