What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a simple but powerful way for any group of people to collaboratively build a website. It is an ideal way to meet the needs so-far-identified by the Pesticide Working Group (PWG) "tools sub-group."
If that's enough explanation to satisfy your curiousity, you are already ready to find out how to add to the Wiki. If you want a little more technical and marketing information first, read on.
This wiki is free! Of course, there is no free lunch. The host company, PBWiki, makes money by showing discreet ads on the wiki, and by encouraging users to upgrade their wiki to the "Silver" version (or higher). The Silver version of PBWiki is $10 per month and offers benefits we would probably want if our wiki becomes very popular within Coming Clean's PWG.
Beyond a wiki, the next level of power in tools for collaboratively building a website would be a "content management system" (CMS). The leading CMS is Drupal, and — you got to love this — Drupal software is free! But that's just the software. We would still need a web server that can host the Drupal software on the web. Access to a web server typically costs about $10 per month.
The level of skill required for contributing to a CMS is somewhat higher than the level of skill required for contributing to a wiki, especially a very streamlined wiki like PBWiki. So it does not — on balance — make sense to start with a CMS even if that might be where we end up. If we do outgrow this wiki, it would be relatively easy to import our pages into a CMS because all the pages we create are pretty straightforward html.
Now you definitely know more than enough to move on to finding out how to add to the Wiki. At some later date, after having gotten some practical experience, you might want some more advanced wiki theory and history.
Thanks
The following organizations within Coming Clean's PWG working group have contributed expertise in establishing the requirements for this wiki, choosing the software that satisfies those requirements, and in establishing the initial organization of the website (alphabetically):
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.