The wonderful world of Wikis. When these things first became popular, I thought the idea was completely ridiculous. Anyone can edit anything they want on someone else’s website? I could see certain situations where this might be useful, but in general I thought they were utterly pointless.

I remember the first time I went to a webpage and discovered I could delete the entire page. Don remembers this. I emailed him and said “go check out this public website” that I had just defaced. I did realize at the time that there was a history of edits and that anyone could just go back to the history and restore the page, but it still seemed to me to be a lot of extra work for what benefit?

I guess Wikipedia has proven me wrong. There have been many similar sites that have popped up that make great use of the Wiki concept. One I just came across today is wikiHow. Basically anything you might want to learn how to do is represented on that site. Granted, some of the instructions are not very detailed, and most do not cover all of the little intricacies and pitfalls you will encounter, but it seems like a great starting point for learning something new. At the bottom of each topic is a list of related topics. In the matter of a couple clicks you could be learning how to do something that you had never even considered before.

How about these for starters:

How to get started in Parkour
How to walk on your hands
How to climb a tree with no branches

Have fun!

Tagged | internet, wiki

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 11:14 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.