I’m very happy to announce, that after much thought and preparation, I have finally launched my own personal wiki! It isn’t the first time I’ve run a wiki. Before the invasion of Iraq I set up the NoWarWikki. I turned off the collaborative editing features after the war, but I continue to host it as a useful web resource (it still gets quite a bit of traffic). That was run using TikiWiki, which is very powerful, but extremely feature-bloated software. I always prefer tools that do one thing extremely well, rather than try to do everything. Fortunately, in the last few months, MediaWiki, the software used to run Wikipedia, has become much easier to install.
I’ve been thinking about installing a wiki for some time. I’ve long stop updating my Bookmarks page, and I like the idea of having a site that anyone can edit. I was also inspired by a recent blog post by Jonathon Delacour, which reminded me that I should really get down to business and do this. I’ve been trying to encourage other people to use wikis for various projects, and now I can offer them space on my own wiki to get started. (E-mail me if you have a project you’d like host on my wiki.) I will also be editing a series of articles on online publishing on Anthropology News, and I intend to post the articles up as pages in my wiki.
The Anthropology News project has led to some interesting legal issues. My wiki, like my blog, has a Creative Commons license, but I don’t own the copyright of the articles I’ve written for Anthropology News — the American Anthropology Association does. They’ve given me permission to post the articles on my wiki, but I have wait till the print articles have been published, and I have to state that they have copyright. The articles will come out the first week of September and the first week of October. The first one, about blogging, will not be published with edit permissions, but it will be linked to a page where further discussion can take place. The second article, on Open Access and wikis, will be fully wikified! I’ll be sure to announce them here, as well as any special projects that end up getting developed on my wiki!
I encourage everyone to go over to the wiki, log in, and help out adding to the topics that I’ve already created.
