(part 2 of 7) Wikia, Wetpaint, PBwiki, Google Sites, and Versionate. There are literally hundreds of different wikis available, each offering unique online experiences and presenting different interpretations of what it means to be wiki. Within this series we explore and discuss the top 3 most popular, free, online wikis and 2 (of very many) notable up-and-comers — and, in the end, announce the winning wiki experience.
Website: Wikia
Briefly: Wikia was found to be the #1 free, hosted wiki, based on Alexa popularity ranking, in April 2007. (read more)
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Enjoyable
- Wikia is the most popular free, online wiki, today. One of the direct benefits to the Wikia user, of this huge popularity, is Wikia‘s equally huge community (support) and user generated content (consumer choice).
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- The inclusion of dynamic widgets provides access to fast and useful wiki information.
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- The full content of any wiki, regardless of administrator, can be downloaded and ported to other platforms. (link: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Database_download)
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Disappointing or Unsatisfying
- The interface through which wiki content is created and edited is critical to increasing adoption and lowering its intimidation factor. Here, Wikia, as is common to many other wikis, does not provide a WYSIWYG interface, but one that requires use of their special markup language.
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- Creating a new wiki cannot be directly accomplished. To create a new wiki, the user has to submit a request for a new wiki, and await its approval.
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- Wikia only supports the management of public content. While administrators can control whether or not a page can be edited, they cannot prevent any page’s viewing.
In the next post of the series I will be exploring the #2 popularly ranked wiki, wetpaint.
Think & Share…
What would change about the Wikia wikis?
Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring best online wiki User eXperiences as well as other upcoming, insightful posts from The Product Guy.
More Information
- Wonderful Wikis… they are Free and they are Hosted!
- Wetpaint wikis. Should you dip in?
- PBwikis. Sticky for almost 500,000.
- Google Sites. All open. Now what?
- Versionate is Dead.
- Best Free Online Wiki Announced!
Enjoy!
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
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The Product Guy 
Great series. Dugg and Mixxed!
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Wikia is only really an option if your trying to build something everybody would use, you don’t have any control over it and if you want to leave they might keep it open and have other people run it.
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Hey Jeremy… ummmm… a great review again on Wikia… your review definitely makes me curious enough to check the service…. let me see… what i can gather from it… thanks for sharing 🙂
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Thanks for the review Jeremy. Your point about the lack of WYSIWYG is well taken. It’s something we’re working on and you can now use WYSIWYG when creating new pages. Here’s an example: create a page on the Gaming Wikia.
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An interesting discussion is definitely worth comment.
I do think that you should publish more
on this subject matter, it may not be a taboo subject but typically people
do not speak about such issues. To the next!
Kind regards!!
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You really make it seem so easy with your presentation however
I find this matter to be actually one thing which I believe I might never understand.
It seems too complicated and extremely vast for me.
I am looking ahead in your subsequent put up, I will attempt to get the cling of it!
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