In has been a few decades since the general acceptance of the World Wide Web. A lot of web’s purposes has already been explored by internet engineers since then. It cannot only be an alternative to other communication media but is far superior. Through the internet, people are somehow brought together under their common interests in the form of a virtual community or a web community. This is where hosting a wiki enters. Now, how do you start and run your own wiki website? Can it be done easily?
Overview of Hosting a Wiki
Nowadays, creating a unique write-ups about something that can catch general public interest is challenging. Before you finally decide on starting to have your own wiki, you need to consider extensive research first just to make sure that your contents for wiki do not already exist yet.
To have a successful wiki, you need to create it for good reasons. It needs to focus on the community and not for your own. Nobody will want to contribute to a wiki that has been created just to highlight somebody.
Self-Hosting or Hosted Wikis?
Planning to run your own wiki have to start from choosing between these two: you will either need to run your very own web server or you can just have somebody else to manage a server for you.
Self-Hosting
There are a lot of people would want to serve their own wikis for more flexibility and as well as power for business applications. Of course, you should have more knowledge with how wikis generally work and about wiki software as well.
If you want to do things from scratch, then you can install whatever kind of wiki engine you desire. With this, you have the power to control everything. You can use your very own hardware, or on any suitable web host.
When it comes to choosing the wiki software, you can choose among more than one hundred wiki engines available at hand. The first thing you should do before deciding is listing all the criteria that are more essential for you. From there, make sure to sort the ones which you think are required and even those that would be great to have. You have to start filtering all the wiki engines which do not feature whatever your required criteria and also the remaining wiki engines which are into the great criteria.
Hosted Wikis
For those who want to have someone else to handle the most technical decisions and support issues, then there are those companies that host wikis for free or for a price. Here are several wiki websites you can check out:
Slimwiki
Most people would choose a wiki platform that doesn’t require complexity. If you have no time or not a technical expert, to begin with, then you would want to know Slimwiki. It is a more straightforward way to create a wiki. This particular website makes it easier for you to create a wiki for your own group, company, or even a project.
MediaWiki
Among all the other wiki platforms available on the web today, MediaWiki is the most popular. It is originally being used on Wikipedia. But the website now also provides the backend for a lot of common wiki websites just like Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and even Wiktionary.
Wikidot
Creating your own wiki doesn’t have to be hard especially with Wikidot. You don’t have to be afraid of facing HTML, PHP, JavaScript and the likes with this site. It is one of the largest wiki websites in the whole world. Moreover, it is a wiki hosting service or a wiki farm. With this, a single instance of wiki’s code actually runs on an array of servers.
DokuWiki
You might confuse DokuWiki with some other wiki hosts at first glance. But, it actually has an easier learning curve. This wiki platform is very great for those who are not tech-savvy and value ease-of-use.
Tiki Wiki
Just like MediaWiki, another open-source wiki-based content management system is popular, the Tiki Wiki. You will enjoy the WYSIWYG editor in this platform is you plan to make your own wiki. It has a complete revision history retention, wiki RSS feeds, and as well as revision comparison tools.
Final Thoughts: Hosting a Wiki
There you have it! Hosting a wiki doesn’t really have to be confusing at all. If you have already created a list of criteria you would want to have for your wiki, then you can easily decide if you want to start from scratch or be in a hosted wiki.
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