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Usage

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 3 months ago

How are people using wikis?

Since I run one of the biggest "Wiki farms" on the Net, I've got some good data on how people use wikis. Many of the actual uses surprised us.

Notes-to-self, organizing thoughts

Some folks find it very useful to have something a little more powerful and accessible than Notepad that can be used as everything from a thought / linkdump to writing a complete novel. It's an easy way for people to input mildly structured data. I even got the idea for doing this presentation as a wiki from several of our users. (I never dreamed this was a PowerPoint replacement!)

Easy solo publishing

Others use a wiki to publish a simple site. This use was also unanticipated, since there are many excellent web page publishing tools (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc) already available and tools for allowing easy web page updates (e.g. blogs) are mature and readily available, extending back even to 1998 (Homestead). But it's simple enough, fast, free, and folks get their own subdomain with PBwiki. We've got a whole community of small booksellers who use their wikis to list their latest inventory.

Group publishing

Groups are using their wikis to communicate their collective beliefs and fantasies to the world. My favorite example of this is the "Elemenstor Saga", a collaborative fiction writing attempt that in its first two weeks got hundreds of editors and tens of thousands of viewers. The wiki has hundreds of pages edited a day, every day -- including Christmas!

Group collaboration

Many groups keep their wikis private and use the wiki as a way to internally track documents, status, etc. RSS feeds let folks keep tabs on what's changed when. This is one of the main ways we see for wikis in the future.

Education

Another use that emerged, much to our surprise, was adoption in the education market. English teachers wanted to engage students with a medium that was participatory and writing-focused. Penn State has adopted us as part of their required Freshman writing core and several teachers from fifth grade to high school have also started using wikis in their curriculum, mixing up Wikipedia research with PBwiki writing.