Tell me about Wikis

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

I'm starting to hear alot about Wikis, and I know basically that they are webpages that can be edited by anyone to add or update information. I'm interested in possibly using one to keep track of campaign information for my game, as it would allow my players to add and expand on information, instead of just me posting information. But there is alot that I don't know about wikis.

Can anyone who visits the page edit it, or can it be limited to people who are given access?
Do wikis need to be hosted on my own space, or is there someplace like blogspot that will set up and host a wiki for me?
Are there different kinds of wikis? Different source codes?
What do I need to know, at a very basic level, to set one up?

Thanks!

 

[XCorvis]

Can anyone who visits the page edit it, or can it be limited to people who are given access?
Do wikis need to be hosted on my own space, or is there someplace like blogspot that will set up and host a wiki for me?
Are there different kinds of wikis? Different source codes?
What do I need to know, at a very basic level, to set one up?

There might be some hosting companies that can do wikis for you, and there may even be some free online wikis that you can use. You'll have to look.

There are quite a few different flavors of wikis. Some are editable by anyone. Some are editable by logged in users. Most are fairly customizable so you can set who can edit certain things. Look at a few and see if there's one you want. A hosting provider that has pre-installed wikis is probably using one in particular.

 

[Ruined]

You can also get software that lets you keep wikis on your PC. I tooled around with a few for a while. WikidPad was probably my favorite, but I lost desire after typing in a large amount of material (although having my laptop fry was more likely the culprit - now I don't use a PC during games). I like it because you can easily hyperlink associated names just by enclosing them in brackets like [this]. Click on the linked word and it takes you to that particular entry.

A trial of WikidPad can be found here: http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/

 

[barsoomcore]

I'm using wikis in a couple of ways and I find I'm still getting used to the wiki way. I'm trying one out as my primary campaign organizer and it's pretty good. It's a standalone application called VoodooPad and it does an okay job. There's a couple of features I'd REALLY like added to it but we'll see.

I'm evaluating a product at work called Confluence for knowledge management, requirements development and so on. I like it, but my CTO's a little skeptical.

It's a really ground-breaking technology, but I'm not sure it's found its "killer app" yet.

What I LOVE about it, as far as campaign organization goes, is if I create a page for, say a country, suddenly every reference to that country throughout all my notes becomes a link to that page. THAT is the feature that I find so compelling for campaign organization. It's a self-updating web site.

 

[IronWolf]

You can also get software that lets you keep wikis on your PC. I like it because you can easily hyperlink associated names just by enclosing them in brackets like [this]. Click on the linked word and it takes you to that particular entry.

A trial of WikidPad can be found here: http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/

Thanks Ruined! Out of curiousity I installed the trial version of WikidPad this evening. I tend to use a mix of laptop and good old Index Cards and paper when DM'ing. Because I can type faster than I can write (especially if you actually want to be able to read what I said) I tend to have a lot of text files on my computer with background information in a campaign.

I took one of my smaller projects and copy and pasted it into different sections of WikidPad and so far it is pretty impressive. Having all of my items quickly linked *and* exportable to html is really nice!! It's only my first night with it, I'll give it another week to be sure, but I may be moving even more of my background information into it.

Oh, and coupled with the fact that the information is stored in plain text, even if I were to move away from the tool in the future or need to access the info from a machine without WikidPad installed I can just open the .wiki files in a text editor and gain access to the info.... Nice!

 

[Aristotle]

Not a lot of talk on this. Since first seeing this thread I've done a bit of research on wikis and think I grasp the concept somewhat better now. I'm thinking of using one for the same purpose as the original poster. I might do another one just to help me organize my homebrew.

I've looked at a few and seem to like MediaWiki the best so far.

 

[silvermane]

I'm starting to hear alot about Wikis, and I know basically that they are webpages that can be edited by anyone to add or update information

.

Strictly speaking they aren't webpages. The pages are generated on the fly from either a MySQL or other database or plain text files with CamelCase.

Can anyone who visits the page edit it, or can it be limited to people who are given access?

Either depending on the preferences. You can restrict editing to registered users and/or certain IPs.

Do wikis need to be hosted on my own space, or is there someplace like blogspot that will set up and host a wiki for me?

WikiFarm? Or else pay a few bucks to have it set up for you.

Are there different kinds of wikis? Different source codes?

Of course, wikis are written in perl, Python, PHP and whatnot, and differ in abilities and markup.

silvermane

 

[drose25]

Wikis come in a zillion different flavors, but most allow you some control over who can edit/post material. If you have your own hosting currently, visit www.hotscripts.com for an excellent archive of webscripts. You can find tons of various wiki scripts there. If you don't have a webhost currently, look for one who offers the Fantastico script installer. It will automatically install either the TikiWiki of PHPWiki scripts for you, saving you the headache of doing it yourself. Or, as the above poster suggested, you can probably find wiki hosting similar to blogspot.

 

[Aristotle]

I've done some research into this and have tried out several different PHP based wikis on my test server. I love this concept now that I grasp the basic idea better. My favorite so far is ewiki. It doesn't have the huge feature list that others have (although some of that can be added through addons) but I love how it was built with the intention of being easily inserted into existing PHP pages or streamlined with other scripts.

Only problem. My web host only has PHP 4.0.6 which doesn't seem to be enough for any of the php based wikis. I'm looking into a better hosting situation.

 

[drose25]

I can help with the hosting situation. If you're interested, let me know.