Wiki Gnome

Last night on the Charlie Rose PBS TV show I saw an interview with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project. Since I am a user of Wikipedia and have a wiki website I was drawn to the interview.

From the interview I learned some things I knew and some things I did not. I learned that Wikipedia was supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. After seeing all these start up internet billionaires, like the creator of Farmland and Mafia games on Facebook, it was refreshing to see an interview for a co-founder of internet service that has meant so much to so many people and was dependent on volunteers and donations. There are over 16 billion articles on Wikipedia worldwide and they just opened a second office in India.

I learned that Wikipedia has nothing to do with other organizations like Wikileaks, an international organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks, except the prefix wiki. What all wiki websites, including this one, have in common is the wiki.

The wiki is a short cut way to create a website. More formally it is “a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.” I am not sure what this all means but if you want to learn about, use or create a wiki website I recommend my Wiki Gnome Tegan Dowling. She designed and built this wiki website and many other great ones. A good wiki gnome makes the website easy to use and teaches her students how to do it themselves and how to help others do the same.

I have been doing this wiki website for nearly four years but still have questions for my wiki gnome, a few more today. Everyone needs a wiki gnome to guide them through the wiki web of life.

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