RecentChanges.info

WikiIndex currently indexes 4375 wiki. Of those, there are 237 multilingual wiki. The languages used by at least 10 wiki (counting both monolingual and multilingual wiki) are:

• 3107 English
• 439 German
• 176 French
• 75 Spanish
• 47 Dutch
• 41 Polish
• 41 Japanese
• 34 Russian
• 31 Chinese
• 30 Italian
• 29 Swedish
• 27 Portuguese
• 15 Finnish
• 13 Hebrew
• 12 Hungarian
• 12 Danish
• 10 Norwegian

These counts only include wiki that WikiIndex currently indexes.
There are many, many other public wiki that haven’t yet been mentioned on WikiIndex — please help us add them.

This weblog post is a little more personal than my other post

The process of organizing the wiki community - already parts of it that are organized, but for the most part, it is a bunch of interesting people doing interesting things.

“The Universal “Wiki” Edit Button leads to a page where you can collaborate, not just comment, commit or comply.” — Ward Cunningham, Inventor of Wiki

Personally, I am most excited by the Oddmuse implementation and am looking forward to extending that wiki out to more people’s attention.

It was very exciting to see wiki developers and wiki hosts extend their wikis into this idea and add themselves to the list.

All in all, this has been a fun few weeks, culminating in an exciting 30 hours or so. As with wiki, I look forward to what others will make of this.

“The amazing quality of many wikis, especially wikipedia, makes people afraid to contribute. But wikis want you to edit them. This button is meant as an invitation for surfers to contribute as much or as little as they want.” — Ehud Lamm

This is a copy of an e-mail I sent to Gil Penchina, Angela Beesley, and Jimmy Wales about the launch of their new “world travel guide”, world.wikia.com. I’m the co-founder of another Open Content travel guide, Wikitravel, which just merged with a rival project, World66. I was disappointed when I heard about the launch of world.wikia.com, and I thought an email was appropriate.

Gil, Angela, Jimmy,

I’m writing to you about world.wikia.com.

As wiki service providers, we straddle two very different worlds: the competitive world of Web business, and the cooperative world of Free Culture.

From a business perspective, nothing is more natural than having two or more competing Web sites in the same space. It stirs us to provide better products and service to our customers.

But from a Free Culture perspective, having two incompatible, uncooperative projects working on the same problem is wasteful and wrong-headed. It splits the community’s effort and time; it wastes energy on needless antagonism; and it makes people sit out entirely as they wait to see whether either project will succeed. (read more)

Evan is co-founder of Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/) — the free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide, and Gil is the new CEO of Wikia (http://www.wikia.com/) — which offers free MediaWiki hosting for your community to build a free content wiki-based website.

I hope that Wikia can figure this one out.

“

The RecentChangesCamp video, in OpenFrame style, is out and it is sweet! (direct download .mov)

WikiSpam is one of the primary problems currently beleaguering wikis everywhere. One solution to the problem is to maintain whitelists of people who have special priviledges. To really make whitelists useful there must be a notion of persistent identity so that whitelists can be shared across wikis. For example, if WardsWiki says that Dave is okay, then I’m going to say Dave is okay on my wiki as well … but … I have to be able to tell that the Dave on WardsWiki is the same Dave that is accessing my wiki.

I’ve just started my search for the identity solution that is best for wikis. Do you have a favorite that you think would be best in the wiki context? If so, drop a comment here with a pointer to where we can find out more and even better yet, a short summary of why this particular solution is a good fit for wikis!

While you are at it check out Eugene Kim’s old but still good survey of the identity space.

via Peter Kaminski:

“Eugene Kim and I got together yesterday after the WikiSpam Workshop here at Wiki Symposium 2005 and hacked together a proof-of-concept universal blacklist wrapper called “Eaton”, which can be used with almost any CGI-based blog or wiki engine.

Eaton is the first client of the community-based wikispam blacklist maintained by the SharedAntiSpam effort that got started at Wikimania in August, and moved ahead a little more here at WikiSym.”

The excitement over this is also heard over at AbbeNormal

The last session that John and I attended was a three and a half hour session where we talked about a number of topics that dealt with the relations between wiki’s. In the first hour we introduced ourselves and suggested various topics that we’d be interested in discussing.
I ended up in a group that had a great talk about “sister” wiki’s. The core idea behind sister wiki’s is to allow easier navigation between similar pages on wiki’s that are “near” each other. For example, if two people ran separate wiki’s on a related subject it would be likely that they would have some pages in common. If they were sister wiki’s, then on those pages, there might be an icon which allowed one to jump to the article on the same topic at the sister site. Locally, it’s a neat idea, but it’s also mind boggling to think about it on a larger level. If all wiki’s were created this way (think six degrees of separation), then it might be possible to traverse the entire wikisphere using sister links. It would also be neat to view all of those links in a giant topological map.

There were other conversations that took place in separate breakouts, but I wasn’t able to attend them all. A neat tool that was used during the meeting was “Gobby”. Gobby (PC based only - grrr…), allowed the PC people in the room to all simultaneously write to a single document. The resultant document is here:

Interwiki Gobby Session

It was pretty neat to watch this unfold. One of the Gobby users projected the collective work on screen for all of us to see. Other tools mentioned which allow collaborative writing are SubEthaEdit, Synchroedit and JotSpot Live.