Building a Wiki Empire
27As a Pro Blog Design reader, you’ve mastered the art of building blogs, but I want to introduce you to another form of managing information, the wiki. Certainly, you’ve seen Wikipedia and may even have contributed your writing to some of the articles. If so, then you know how easy it is to organize information with a wiki. You also may have noticed that Wikipedia tends to rank high in search engines. There are several reasons for this, but my theory is that the information is not only useful, but it also has a lot of internal links that may help articles reach the all-important Google top 10.
Let me start by saying that there are several hosting packages for wikis currently, such as wikia.com. I do not recommend going with these “wiki farms” because you will have no ownership of the wiki. You won’t be able to customize your site as much and you’ll be at the mercy of the whims of the wiki farmer. Most wiki farms will keep some or all of the advertising revenue. Plus, what happens if the wiki farm goes out of business? Basically by going with a wiki farm you have no ownership and no control over your destiny. Don’t build someone else’s wiki empire when you can start your own.
The first step to building your wiki empire is choosing your wiki software. There are dozens of wiki platforms. However, for the sake of simplicity, I recommend Mediawiki. Mediawiki is the same software platform that Wikipedia uses, so it is constantly updated and there are plug-ins for everything. Plus, Mediawiki will give users a sense of familiarity that they might not otherwise have if you choose another software package. But if you’re feeling adventurous, it can’t hurt to go through and review some of the other wiki formats.
Next, you will want to choose a skin. There are dozens of free skins out there for Mediawiki. My favorite so far is the Clean Mediawiki style. This style is so simple and clean that article pages appear to be regular web pages. If you don’t want to skin your wiki, you can always go with the common Mediawiki look, if you don’t mind the mix of menu overload and drab gray.
Installing Mediawiki is a snap. You download the Mediawiki files and unzip them in your server directory at the top level of your domain. Be sure you have created a new MySQL instance with a username and password. You then hit the main page by typing in your domain and Mediawiki guides you through the rest of the setup. I won’t go into the details in this article, but suffice to say that Mediawiki is one of the easier software platforms to use if you are willing to invest just a little time.
You’ll need to add some plugins to your wiki configuration. If you chose Mediawiki as your software platform, then there are two plugins I recommend. The first plugin is for logging searches. It is called, plainly enough, the Log Searches extension. This will enable you to know exactly what your users are searching for which will help you know if your wiki needs a new article. The second plugin is the Google Sitemap extension which will make it incredibly easy to generate Google Sitemaps, which Google uses to find and index the various pages of a website.
Now that you know a few of the technical aspects of building a wiki, you’re ready to go. That is, if you can decide what your wiki will be about and find an appropriate domain name. Oh, and you need to choose your content license as well. Most wiki content is under the GNU Public License, meaning that it is free to copy and reproduce. However, a few wikis have gone the private route of copyrighting the material even if it is contributed by a community.
The great thing about building your wiki empire is that once you have momentum, your wiki will rank high in the search engines and there will be users generating content for you. The hard part is getting that momentum, which means that just like blogging, you will spend a lot of time writing content and gathering links before your site gets noticed.
Keep in mind that it’s estimated that only one percent of wiki users generate half of all content and edits, and two percent of the users generate about three-quarters of the content. So if you aren’t pulling in a few hundred users every day, you won’t be getting much fresh content. But once you do reach that threshold, your empire will be well underway, as wikis have the nice advantage of growing exponentially.
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Interesting article, at least something unusual here. Only there must to be careful with all those links at wiki i think. Thanks for sharing.
While I think Wiki’s are generally useful, this is a great article about creating your own.
@ Michael – How does this relate to Blog Design?? :(
While I understand some of your criticisms about “wiki farms”, at Wikia we use the GFDL (or other free licensing of your choice, say, a Creative Commons license) and provide data dumps of the sites themselves. If Wikia goes down for the count, or you have irreconcilable differences you can just take that dump and move the site somewhere else.
I think wiki is boring
I’ve been thinking a lot about doing a wiki, so this is good timing. Thanks, Mark!
This is a good introduction to Wiki’s for sure, but I’ve yet seen a blog or website be created that has been able to analysis the critical success factors to some of the web’s most successful Wikis, even though some of the same key ideas from successful blogging transition over (like how focusing on a niche is almost necessary for Wiki sites even more so than blogs).
I also agree with a self-hosted Wiki platform over 3rd party hosting. Even though in practice there’s unlikely to be any problems that occur with availability or licensing, a self hosted wiki usually feels more professional, and long-term.
I think a Wiki would be great for my personal family website, ie: show off a family tree etc etc…
but I wish this tutorial had more step by step instructions, I mean I like tutorials that treat readers like babies: big picture here – > big arrow pointing to where to click -> screenshot showing folder to drop install files into etc etc… I mean I don’t know how to create a MySQL username, guess I’ll have to get the php guy to help with that.
Once installed how do I start creating pages and making them link to each other? I mean know how in HTML, but is there a wiki framework or something that could make that easier?
Maybe wiki’s aren’t for strickly designers :/
Lipton, in your case you may want to use a wiki farm, since it would be a family project.
As for making links and so on, do a search for “Mediawiki syntax”. For most wikis you just log-in and then click on the edit link to begin editing. From there you can create content. If you know HTML already, then wiki syntax will be a breeze.
Interesting article! I’ve come here through 9rules, to see who also made the list. Keep it up, I like it!
I’ve used Mediawiki in the past, but didn’t finish the ‘project’. It might be a good idea to build a wiki website again. Wiki’s are getting more and more popular these days.
It’s also great that you write about other things than blog design. Great post!
Great post!
I never thought about building a wiki empire. I’ve been thinking about link directories a lot lately — anything besides a blog really.
This is an awesome idea. It should be an interesting project for me. Thanks!
Cool
Thanks!
Thanks Mark I’ll def check that out :)
I had thought about a wiki in the past but as you rightly point out in your article, 1% of users write the whole wiki, so since I do not have a great following, I quickly realised I was going to write it all myself and decided against it, much better writting a proper blog tutorial than a wiki. No thanks.
hardly any articles even get approved for Wiki. It is actually quite crazy, you are basically writing a thesis for college.
If i start my wiki, i will never be able to outrun wikipedia.org I would need to hire 1000 article wrighters and editors first :)
an interesting perspective on marketing.
Wiki is on the way out…
I suspect it has all been done to death. Best move on and come up with a new, more web 3.0 idea and concept. It’s a great article BTW and I’m sure wiki is the way to go for some people.
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