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. With Unconsumption: What do you know about wikis?
Posted Under: Unconsumption
To follow up on yesterday:
What I would like to see happen next in the unconsumption project is the creation of an unconsumption wiki.
I envision it being a better version of this page I created a while ago — where I tried to roll up a lot of information about good ways to (responsibly, satisfyingly) get rid of used-up stuff of all kinds. I liked the idea of creating a resource, but it became really clear really quickly that it was impractical to do it the way I was trying to.
A wiki seems better because it wouldn’t depend on me — anybody could contribute and improve it and add to it at any time. I believe it could be a great source.
I don’t know anything about wiki creation, so my colleague Tom Hosford has looked into it a little bit (exploring options like Mediawiki; Wikia; PBwiki). But I’ll cut to the chase: We could use some help.
1. If you have an opinion about any of the wiki tools just mentioned, or others not mentioned, tell me.
2. Better: If you know (or want to learn) how to build a wiki and you want to get involved in this project, let me know.
Reach me here: murketing@robwalker.net.
Or if you know somebody who want to get involved, pass it along and have them get in touch.
I think this could be a really cool and useful thing, that would have a very positive impact. And I am willing to push, handle, and take responsibility for certain aspects of it — but only if I believe that others are really into it, too, and are willing to truly get involved.
So … I hope to hear from you!
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Kim Fellner's book 
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Reader Comments
Some of my work colleagues and I just started a wiki using Wikispaces:
http://www.wikispaces.com/About
We’re pretty happy with it so far. Ours is an inivitation-only wiki; i.e., only people who’ve received an invitation to it and have joined it can update it. So that’s one issue you should think about or look into; do you want to allow anyone to modify your wiki (probably not), or do you want to control the process? (You could have a note on the home page like “Want to add to this wiki? Send me an email and I’ll send you an invite.”)
http://www.wetpaint.com is another good wiki-builder. I’ve used it for professional projects.
http://www.crushnet.com/enowiki
This all I’ve seen in the wine world.
Thanks for checking out PBwiki.
It looks like you already know what you’re talking about but I thought I would give you two quick tips I’ve seen from working at a wiki company.
Successful wikis take a lot of work in the beginning – usually it’s just two people sharing information before the community jumps in to participate.
Here are my two quick wiki tips:
1) Make sure you set the context so folks know how to interact with your wiki and you should definitely seed content on important pages. (http://twitter.pbwiki.com/ does that well)
2) Talk about the wiki, link to it, share unique content there — continue to encourage your community to participate. (That’s how Paul got so many people on his http://crm20.pbwiki.com/)
Pretty simple tips ;)
– Kristine (I work at PBwiki)
for me, using something non-commercial, open licensed, and open source is always important. I would point you to dokuwiki, which I have used for a few projects, does not require a database, and therefor is pretty easy to set up. And wikispot.org which is a non-profit, free, hosted service to help communities create wikis. Both are great and would work for what you’re describing.