I wiki, do you?

One of the newest trends these days are wikis. The most famous is wikipedia available at http://www.wikipedia.org. This is an online encyclopedia where anyone on the Internet can contribute to enhance the information in wikipedia.

In general, wikis are collaboration tools which allow multiple people to edit a document to share information. These documents are presented as web pages. However, knowledge of HTML is not required. Wikis have their own simplified formatting markup language. For example, to make something bold, you simply enter *bold*. To make an ordered list, you simply use the # sound, like:

# bananas
# apples
# oranges

And they will automatically appear as:

1. bananas
   
2. apples
   
3. oranges
   

For those of you who are not familiar with markup languages would wonder why you wouldn't simply number your own lists. Markup languages make for easy modification. For example, if I had a list of 25 numbered items, and then I needed to add a new #1 item, I would have to renumber all the other 25 items... But with a markup language, I simply add a new "# pears" and it will automatically take care of numbering all of the items.

At work, we have already discovered the advantages of wikis and are trying to use them within our project. However, the tools we use are only available within our own company. For personal wikis, there are websites available on the Internet which provide wikis, many of them are free.

One of the available places for free wikis is PBwiki. I haven't yet defined the uses for my own personal wiki, but I am sure I will be taking advantage of this soon. Some of the functional benefits are:

• Easy to use markup language
• Sharing of information
• Automatic versioning of changed information
  

Free acounts are available at PBwiki. Premium accounts are also available for more storage.