cream and crud

summary:

The profusion of uncompleted wiki sites here is so depressing and your missing a revenue opportunity...

cream and crud

styloid 1181904951|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I am looking at using a wiki - but am worried that my site I do will end up as half cocked and messy as most sites here. I've been trying to look for good example sites and find 98% junk.

It creates the feeling that wiki's are easy to set up but hard to get beyond the "good idea" stage.

So i suggest you create a further sub class of wiki - that of working wiki - which is a in use tool - and play wiki - which is for people to experiment with.

There are lots of wikis - free and paid for - and they are easy to get started. I started 4 yesterday to play with and find out about the features.

I am afraid these will rot on cyber space now until doomsday - as I'm now searching elsewhere.

I need to see examples of top sites, not have to wade though 100's of students woefully incomplete work!, to help me form an opinion.

I further suggest that you can CHARGE for the transition from play to working site - a nominal amount - as $20 - annually - this can pay for some feature like making the site self login (and by implication making the unpaid, play site invitation only).

By the way - the feature I am looking to see are emedded video ( so I can add little training to my pages, skypme to people can phone me, photos showing whats possible and imaginative style themes.

last edited on 1181905006|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by styloid + show more

Re: cream and crud

hartnell 1181911849|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

You won't find better content management or wiki software. Here's some examples, as requested :

http://wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com/
http://gamedesign.wikidot.com/
http://wow-unity.wikidot.com/
http://www2.boardgamewiki.com

Everything you need to know about building and maintaining a wiki on wikidot can be found using the help link at the bottom of every page.

—hartnell

"rot in cyberspace…. looking elsewhere…" — be nice next time.

last edited on 1181911890|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by hartnell + show more

Re: cream and crud

styloid 1181914495|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks for the links.

I agree this is good wiki software - the best Ive found so far - but have you seen the proportion of tiny sites without any real content - this applies to all free wiki such as www.wik.is as well

and Argggh - cyber space is so touchy - re "looking elsewhere" —— I was not being cruel - but honest -and only one of the 4 sites I started was a wikidot site.
When can such sites started as an idle wim or caffene / alchohol fueled aberation , slip out of their pointless and unnoticed cyber existance ?

Re: cream and crud

hartnell 1181918785|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Sorry, my bad, I thought you meant that your sites were being left to "rot in cyberspace" and you had already claimed you were looking elsewhere.

Now I take offense to the remark "caffeine fueled aberration", as I am one. :) Just kidding.

I know what you mean about the majority of sites. It's true. And it's not only that way on wik.is and other wiki farms, but on any free host of any kind.

If you need any help, just ask. :)

—hartnell

Re: cream and crud

DebT 1183490395|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I know it's been a while since anyone posted in this topic, but I have some comments to make. First of all, I believe the reason for all those half-cocked and messy sites here is due to the fact that to some people wikis are not at all easy to set up, especially for first-timers. Having designed one non-wiki site and been a member of wiki, I came here thinking set-up would be a piece of cake.

I couldn't be more wrong! Honestly, if I could find another free wiki site that offered the features WikiDot does and had instructions written for someone like me, or had more things already set up, I would go there in a New York minute. I have definite plans for my wiki and it's not going to be put together just any old way. In fact, those that are, or those that are abandoned just help to bring the entire group down, and WikiDot as well. It would be better to have 5 quality sites than to have 50 of poor quality.

Back to designing the site: Something that a person who has designed wikis before or one who has a lot of knowledge of how things work behind the scenes of a site, would have a whole lot less problems than I am. I'm having to learn everything fresh and I'm doing a lot of trial and error and making a lot of mistakes. This is nothing new for me because everything I've learned about computers has been self-taught. Still, it gets frustrating, and I think many people just throw up their hands and say, "I quit," or "that's good enough." As long as I see some kind of progress every day, and I am, my site will sooner or later be another quality site here, probably a lot later than sooner.

So, though there are a lot of poor sites here and something should be done about them for the sake of those building quality sites, I would look at the reasons that might be behind their messes.

Deb

Re: cream and crud

hartnell 1183495063|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

More information is coming out soon in the form of The Weekly Wiki Madman and it's daily theming tutorial : 365. :)

The issue of abandoned subdomains is a major issue with me, and I'm glad you agree. Not just abandoned subdomains, but terribly misused subdomains, such as http://power-rangers.wikidot.com. As a power rangers fan ^[1] I can't see what this wiki has anything to do with ANY power rangers series. In fact, they're just BSing, including even Star Wars characters. Yet, they have the power-rangers subdomain and they even use the power rangers logo. I can only imagine what the person behind an organic search engine referall must think of wikidot after browsing through that one.

—hartnell

[1]. I'm 30 years old. I'm a power rangers fan. I'm an ADD adult. I'm properly medicated. Life… is… good… :)

Re: cream and crud

JohnB 1183647265|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

*grins* its just an ESOL kid setting up a SF Role Play type environment. Everyone has to learn somewhere, and that often involves a lot of copying from other sources.

Re: cream and crud

Craig Macomber 1187942330|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

This is a old topic, but still relevant.

I guess I must be in a special situation with some web design experience, an object oriented programming background, a pure hate of poorly designed site navigation systems, and a clear view of the large amount of complexly interrelated stuff my wiki will hold. I also have many example sites on the same subjects with differing organizational structures. I found it astonishingly easy to get my wiki setup, and easy (but time consuming (200 edits or so) with some (but little) trial and error) to reorganize it into something usable after I had added some content and learned about wikidot. My main problem is how to structure and organize my data which is a problem I deal with frequently. Once I got my plan (inspired by page trees, categories and page parents as well as some evolving trends as I added data to my old system) I just reorganized and almost everything I wanted was supported. I learned CSS while making a theme too. Everything just came out easy and nice. Now, it did probably take 40+ hours of my time, but that does not bug me, mainly because it came out much better than my other web sites which took longer and were for much simpler tasks. I must be the current optimal target user. I have a vision for my wiki, all it needs is more content (I already have enough viewers! I get 3-4 google hits a day (They stay for over 7 min now on average) along with much more referred and direct traffic. About 100 page views a day recently.). Everything else is in place, and I am very impressed with the result.

Now on the original topic of this topic: There is a box of featured wikis on the front page. I personally think there should be a more link on it. It would be great to have a full page (2*20) of around 40+ selected nice wikis. If you have problems finding featured ones you can provide a submission link instead of the "ping us with your creation" which does not really explain what to do. (PM Michal or email support I suspect) I have to wonder how many really great wikis are out there. How about a flickr gallery of wiki screen shots so you can go through and read descriptions of wikis and mouse over the gallery for names as well as see themes and some content. If links work in the descriptions it would be great. If there is interest we (possibly I) can set it up in the community wiki somewhere. Just add a gallery for the tag WikiDotSite (That shouldn't show up on unrelated photos too often) or maybe a photo set on a group so we can edit out incomplete/poor entries (lacking a proper description, duplicate, spam etc). I haven't figured out group photo sets yet though.

last edited on 1187942544|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Craig Macomber + show more

Re: cream and crud

hartnell 1188030127|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

First Craig, I'd like to bow down to you. I'm not worthy. Really. I've started emulating some of your organization solutions, as per your recent changes page on some of my wikis. You.. are … an … organizational … god! Someone make this man an admin!

Secondly, the one of the reasons you don't see the Madman anymore is because Michal has steadfastly refused to change the featured content for about … since the first wikis he put in there. We have no idea why, and there is no acknowledgment of why except for one time he said something to me like ".. I suppose I should…" and it was never done.

Part of me thinks that one reason is because Michal is so dedicated to open source and I understand this. I just wish he was more dedicated to the green… wait, what color is Polish money?

—hartnell

PS. I started community2.wikidot.com, but, I'm wondering if my heart is really in it. I have to restore GDN to its former glory first.

Re: cream and crud

Craig Macomber 1188160000|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thank you for your compliments. I'm glad I could help with organization within the wikidot family of wikis.

I have been wondering about my recent changes page (I just copied stuff from the community forum for it by the way). It has over 25% of my page views, way more than any other page. More than twice as many views of any other page. As far as my organizational skills, that wiki and some source code are about all I have that is organized. I clean my desktop when it exceeds 100 items for example. My wiki is only organized for 2 reasons, I know/knew what types of content would be there, and I had the tools to organize it easily (No annoying maintaining of any page lists by hand). Most of the time when I work on a site I run into limitations about what I can do. Things like no bread crumbs, limited hierarchy depth (often at 1 or 2 levels) or simply bad/slow navigation tool. I decided to organize my wiki the best I could with wikidot, and I was never stopped my limits of missing features.

I guess my organizational system can be described as follows: All pages have parents. Large groups of children pages get categories especially commonly extended lists so it is easy to fix then users forget to set the parent (Setting parent with new page already requested). Child pages inherit (in the sense of object oriented programming or CSS) the information from their parents (information on all parent pages should apply to all child pages). If any page gets too long, confusing, or hard to edit, it should be broken up into child pages which can be included if necessary. If a page is relevant to many pages it is associated through tags and/or links.