Wikis For Dummies®

Chapter 3. The Thousand Problem-Solving Faces of Wikis

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Understanding how wikis adapt to a variety of uses

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Surveying wiki categories

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Exploring content- and process-focused wikis

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Getting connected with community-oriented wikis

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Simplifying your life with ease-of-use wikis

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Hunting for more wikis

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The universal applicability of wikis represents a challenge to the beginner. Wikis can help almost any group of people do almost anything, which can make it difficult to figure out how to get started. This chapter takes you through all sorts of examples of wikis ranging from the biggest — with hundreds of thousands of pages, used by thousands of people all over the world — to the smallest, which exist to help just a few people.

In taking this tour, you’ll probably find wikis so valuable that they become part of your everyday life. You are also likely to find wikis that seem so useless you cannot understand why anyone would ever visit.

Almost every wiki has ten readers for each person who actively adds content. If you really get lucky, you might find a wiki so exciting that you join the core content-creating team and start shoveling your ideas and thoughts into it by the bucketful.

The main goal of this chapter is to make the idea of what wikis can do much more specific. By the end of this chapter, you will have ...