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The Wikidot business plan.
For potential wiki developers — practically everyone.
The Wikidot business model is a patch of sunshine in a gloomy world. The Wikidot owner is Michal Frackowiak Working alone, he spent 5 months at his home in Poland writing the wikidot software.
The use of open source software let him develop great software for nickels and dimes (well, actually $4000.)
His software lets you – and everyone else — make maximum use of one of the greatest combinations of our time ;
the Internet,
the wiki system of collaborative writing,
open source software,
persons, world wide, willing to volunteer their time and intelligence to create
sound information.
This combination matured (and exploded) to create the wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that acts as a model for other “wikis.”
Michal's wikidot.com offers you the combination of tools used by wikipedia— plus some new tools. The tools can be used by you for building and running your own wikis. And the tools are free – and your wikis will be hosted free.
Your wikis can be used to run your skateboard club or change history by completely restructuring health care. Or run a business. Or do anything else that is decent and legal.
Michal has created a business model that makes him pretty much a dream host. He has established a server farm where he promises to host your wikis free forever — and he will smile if they grow to be the size of the wikipedia or larger.
You will never pay Wikidot a cent. If you choose to, you can have google type ads on your sites. If you do this, Wikidot you will get 80% of the income from Google or other firms that pays for clicks made from your site/s (and charges the owners of the sites that you click more. )
If 80% is not enough for you, Michal provides the software free that will let you run your wikis on your own server. He even encourages you to establish clones of wikidot.com.
He believes in the power of collaborative writing – and the communities that it builds – to make this a better world. He is a very practical idealist.
You can help prove that he is right. Or just have fun, Or just make money.
Any decent and legal thing that you choose to do with your wiki/s is OK with Michal.
Wiki reader?
You may be simply be someone who wants to access information that happens to be hosted on wikidot's servers. Wikidot provides you with lists of the wikis that it hosts and a search engine that will chase down your questions.
Usually you arrive at a wiki here by entering a search question into Google, Yahoo or another search engine. You probably won't notice that that wikidot is involved. The involvement may even be kept secret if the wiki owner choose to have a personal domain name used. (Another courtesy of Michal.)
Wikidot's involvement in getting you to sites that it hosts will be its system for making sure that any public wiki that it hosts will get the maximum amount of Internet attention.
If the wikie owner chooses to, this will be done automatically by software that will ask you to providing extra search terms.
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More important, if you choose to, you can improve any information on a wiki by editing it, adding to it, or by adding articles. If your changes are useful, they will usually survive – and make the wiki a better source of information and the world a better place.
Have fun.
