YK: Available hosts

Available hosts

Instead of setting up a new wiki on your own domain, from scratch, you may want to have your wiki hosted on an existing website dedicated to wiki hosting ­ such sites are usually referred to as "wiki farms", or, as Wikipedia prefers to call them, "wiki hosting services". The advantage of such a setup is that it’s much easier to get started -- you can often set up a wiki on a wiki farm, and start editing it, in minutes. Also, for the most part, you don’t have to worry about the software -- you don’t have to set up MediaWiki or any extensions, and you don’t have to update it as new versions come out, because the wiki farm presumably takes care of that.

On the other hand, there are disadvantages to using a wiki farm, as there are any time that one’s data is put in "the cloud" ­ to use the current buzzword for online data. There’s no guarantee that the wiki’s contents won’t be lost, if the website in question stops operating, or there’s some technical glitch, or it gets hacked. And if your wiki is meant to be private, there’s the risk that its contents will get revealed due to some security leak. Of course, all the same risks exist on any computer network that your wiki might run on ­ but on third-party websites, the perception, at least, is that the risk is greater.

Let’s say that you do want to use a wiki farm, though, and (since you’re reading this book) that you want the software it runs on to be MediaWiki. Thankfully, MediaWiki is a popular wiki engine for wiki farms ­ in fact, it appears to be easily the most popular, with at least five serious wiki farms that use it. By comparison, most other wiki engines power no more than one.

The biggest MediaWiki-based wiki farm, by far, is Wikia, at wikia.com. In fact, it’s the most popular wiki farm of any kind; according to the Alexa traffic-monitoring service, it’s currently among the top 200 most popular websites in the world, and among the top 100 in the United States. And that may be even understating its popularity, since some of its most popular wikis, like Memory Alpha (for Star Trek) and WoWWiki (for the video game World of Warcraft) have their own domains, which means that Alexa isn’t counting them as part of Wikia’s traffic.

Wikia was founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales ­ the co-founder of Wikipedia ­ as well as Angela Beesley (now Angela Beesley Starling), who was a Wikimedia Foundation board member at the time. For that reason, some people think Wikia is affiliated with Wikimedia or Wikipedia, but in fact there’s no official connection.

Wikia differs from most other wiki farms in that they have to approve every new wiki that is proposed, with the main criterion being whether this new wiki will get sufficient traffic (Wikia currently gets all their revenue from the ads they run on the pages). So a wiki meant for use only by a specific group or organization wouldn’t be accepted, and a private wiki wouldn’t even be possible ­ all Wikia wikis are public. In practice, most wikis on Wikia ­ and certainly most of the popular ones ­ are on pop-culture topics: TV shows, movies, video games and books, with a special focus on anything related to science fiction or fantasy. If the wiki you’re considering creating is anything along these lines, Wikia is a very reasonable choice.

Other wiki farms tend to allow anyone to create a wiki, with each wiki getting either a subdomain of the wiki farm’s main domain, or a directory. In some cases, wiki farms make their money from ads, while in others, they get money from customers who pay for extra service.

The MediaWiki-based wiki farm closest to my heart is Referata, at referata.com ­ that’s because I created it and still run it, via WikiWorks. Referata has been around since 2008; it exists in order to provide hosting of a specific set of MediaWiki extensions based around Semantic MediaWiki ­ which you’ll be hearing much more about later in the book. (To be fair, a few other wiki farms provide support for SMW as well.) Referata offers a standard usage of MediaWiki for free, with some options ­ like making one’s wiki private ­ requiring a monthly payment.

Wikkii (wikkii.com and wikkii.net) is another interesting host ­ wikkii.com offers standard hosting, while wikkii.net allows administrators to install any custom extensions and skins that they want. Both are free.

Other long-running MediaWiki-based wiki farms are EditThis.info (editthis.info) and Wiki Site (www.wiki-site.com).

How to choose one of these? For simple wikis, it shouldn’t really matter. But if you have the need for special features, you can try looking at the site’s "Special:Version" page, to see what version of MediaWiki it’s running, and what extensions it has installed. You can also look at any of the wikis already hosted on that farm (usually there are a few linked from the homepage), to see what they look like, whether they’re inundated with spam (you can check Special:RecentChanges for that), how quickly they load, whether they have a distracting amount of ads, etc.