Thursday, October 16, 2008 Toral: Creating your own wiki By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
IF you want to create a website where your peers can contribute content, then wiki may be an alternative worth exploring. I tried creating one a few years back at http://digitalfilipino. pbwiki. com with the intention of providing content for the Philippine Internet Review, gradually developing it online and regularly updating it.
What makes wiki different compared to blogs and traditional websites are the things you can do through it. This includes.
Collaboration. You can invite users to contribute content. This includes the option of becoming an author or collaborator and be able to edit content submitted by peers.
History trail. Wikis provide a history of the revisions and additions made. This allows you to track and even go back to previous editions, to restore them if necessary.
File sharing. Whatever gets uploaded is shared with fellow contributors and authors.
Feedback. Depending on the wiki tool that you use, visitors and contributors can also leave comments and give suggestions to the content you have created.
Syndication. Similar to blogs, some of the wiki site creation tools today also have really simple syndication or RSS. People can subscribe and be alerted of the changes that go through the site.
On the downside, wikis have their own tags or codes and those who are not patient enough may find the process intimidating. However, once you learn how, you can include ads and make it full blown. This is especially true for educational institutions and those with major content development projects.
There are several local wiki initiatives worth exploring if you want to get a feel on how this works. You can visit: Cebu Wikipedia (http://ceb.wikipedia.org/), Cebuano-based version of the Wikipedia site.
WikiFilipino (http://fil.wikipilipinas. org) and WikiPhilippines (http://en.wikipilipinas.org) are Filipino and English wiki websites. They do not necessary have the same content but both provide a lot of information about the Philippines that students will find useful.
If you are a government official, a known personality or an organization, among others, having accurate information about yourself posted in wiki pages is important. Visit the above sites today and update your information.
Ed’s note:
Last week’s column of Ms. Toral should have stated:
“Bills payment is very useful because it allows you to pay utility, credit card and mobile phone bills, as well as insurance anywhere in the world. However, outages occur and some banks do not sent prompt notices or explanations.
The Philippine National Bank, for example, take the time to send e-mails notifying depositors of possible downtime.” Our apologies for the confusion caused about the bank’s practice of promptly notifying clients about downtime.
