Why Wiki Spot

Manifesto of sorts, sprinkled with testimonials, goes here!

Okay, what's really important about Wiki Spot

• Anyone can create a wiki and start a community
  

• Linking wikis is awesome
  

• Nonprofit free service
  

• Quick editing and simple syntax reduce barriers to getting people involved

Compared to any other wiki software/hosting solution, Wiki Spot is just better. It's faster, more customizable, easier to get users to join and edit, easier for users to edit, easier to administer, and faster to start using today!

Why [Torontopedia] is on [WikiSpot]:

Here are my reasons for first shortlisting [Project Sycamore] as the wiki engine of choice, then choosing [WikiSpot] hosting over installing and hosting it on our own servers.

• Wikis are today where Blogs were two or so years ago in the minds of regular mainstream folks on the web. Not everyone gets the concept of wikis...yet.
  

• MediaWiki, the wiki engine powering Wikipedia, is geared not as general wiki software, but geared for running Wikipedia specifically. If a Wikipedia clone is not your goal, then using MediaWiki software is not a good choice.
  

• We found http://Wikinfo.org running on http://GetWiki.net software, a fork of MediaWiki, as a better choice...if you want to clone wikipedia or a significant part of it, yeah, but for a city based wiki, GetWiki software still didn't have that community feeling. So we kept looking.
  

• After discovering [DavisWiki] and looking around, we found a real community, with great entries, some short, some long, with numerous conversations and ongoing comments. Great, this is what we'd love to have here in Toronto. We now have a role model in DavisWiki. Next, hosting there or here?
  

• [Project Sycamore] is written in Python and not PHP programming language. We ain't familiar with Python at all, so anything to ease the learning curve is, anything to help us get up and running easier and faster is better and reassuring.
  

• Hosting [Torontopedia] on [WikiSpot] has allowed us to get up and running almost immediately. We've gotten farther in seeding our city wiki with initial articles, and creating template pages, than had we stuck with GetWiki, which was what we were using through last month, until we discovered Wiki Spot.
  

• In short, Wiki Spot is an online community of people who care about their cities and communities, understand wikis, are able to explain wikis and city wikis in plain English with much less technical lingo than on many other hosted wiki providers.
  

• In choosing Wiki Spot, you don't simply get a blank empty canvas and the wiki equivalent of writer's block. You become part of The Wiki Spot Community, where role model wikis, templates, and experience in running a city wiki are available to you.

Please feel free to completely redo my above bullet points, into a more general Why Wiki Spot sales pitch. I just typed the above off the top of my head. I'll do more asap. —HiMY

in no order — some points to stress:

• The concept of interwiki & paying attention to what's important
  

• recent changes, bookmarks, other stuff
  

• ease of editing
  

• comments, quick edit
  

• customization — themes, your own domain if you want it
  

• power and ease of administration
  

• security settings (page-level, too). user groups.
  

• easy to do stuff in general
  

• nonprofit effort; we're all working together on this. a safe and supporting home for wikis.

we should break out all these points into major areas and then have a lot of text, maybe quotes, and screenshots / images for each section.

Wiki Spot is a new option in wiki hosting and and software, but we offer many benefits over other wiki software and wiki providers.

What does Wiki Spot offer?

Wiki Spot is a nonprofit organization, run completely by your donations and the generosity of the wiki developers. We will not use your wiki for commercial purposes, and we ask that you do the same. Our nonprofit nature allows you to build your wiki for your community, not for corporate interests. Wiki Spot will always be a free service, run on free software.

With its own intuitive markup, a Wiki Spot wiki eliminates many of the barriers keeping new visitors from becoming new editors. Users don't have to know HTML to make good looking edits; anyone can contribute without knowing extensive programming languages.
Example markup:

• __this__ to underline
  

• =This= to make a header.
  

• ["Help with Linking" link] makes a link

With features such as inline Quick Edit, site users can easily edit the parts of the page that catch their interest. Just a double-click on any section opens up a miniature editor (try it!). If you're working on a wiki page that has a location, such as many pages on local wikis, all you need to do to add a map to a page is to enter its street address.

By joining Wiki Spot, your wiki is automatically connected to other wiki projects for building greater community. Simply post your wiki on the Wiki Directory, and existing Wiki Spot users can easily cross over to your wiki, using the same account. You can collaborate with other wikis, and even have special links in between wikis.

You don't need to have any knowledge of webservers to start a wiki. All you need is a vision to build a new community. To start a wiki, all you need to do is head to Create a wiki, come up with a name, and you're off and running! You don't have to deal with webservers, Apache, Linux, SQL, Python, or backups — all of that is handled by the wiki developers.

To handle virtually all administrative needs, you don't need to hack the code of the site. Your wiki's Wiki Settings page gives you the ability to easily upload new stylesheets, set your logo, configure access controls, ban users and more. If you ever get lost, you can see Wiki Spot's Help for Wiki Administrators, or just ask a question.

If you ever decide to leave the Wiki Spot project, all of your edit history is saved in a database. We are currently working on stuff to make us more portable with other wiki software.

While not the biggest wiki software, our software has been run on several large wikis, including the nearly 10,000-page Davis Wiki. We have a large community that can find and fix bugs quickly. In addition, we keep backups.