Wiki
THis page is undergoing intensive development in the next few days.
Wiki is a rapidly emerging technology that has many ministerial possililities.
This Encyclopedia is itself a wiki.
What is a wiki?
A wiki is a website designed for collaboration.
Unlike a traditional website where pages can only be read, in a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML.
An owner or anyone authorized by an owner can magage this webiste as long as they have Internet access.
If appropriate pages (or even an entire wiki) can be locked so no one can edit.
Each page has a built in link to another page where discussions can take place.
Wikipedia
The major impetus for the growing popularity of wikis came from the amazing growth of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The English version, started in 2001, currently (1/2006) has more than 900,000 articles.
The fact that anyone can create and edit pages in Wikipedia sounds like a formula for disaster but it is not.
In fact in a recent blind study conducted with a panel of scientists who were given comparable articles in Wikipedia and Britannica the error rate per article for Britannica was 3 per article and Wikipedia 4.
How can I use it?
Establish a parish website or Intranet
- Publish parish information (A 24/7 parish information desk)
- Publish parish news and events
Manage Meetings and Organize your group
- Schedule meetings
- Create agendas
- Reserve conference rooms
- Record meeting notes
- Display results in a group calendar
Project Management
- Synchronize remote locations and team members
- Monitor progress with a comprehensive calendar
Collaboration and Community
- Blog
- Submit Feedback
- Simple Poll
- Contact Manager
Outreach
- Youth
- Young Adults
- Parents
- Inacctives
To Do List / Task Management Productivity for a distributed team
- Shared calendar and table views
- Assign tasks
- Set priorities
- Schedule due dates
- Organize tasks by group
- Flag items for discussion
Documentation (Professional or Personal)
- Easily create a valuable information archive to provide superior context and utility for others not involved in the data creation process.
- Miscellaneous
JotSpot offers an Application Gallery to see a list of ready-made "application templates". One-click install these into your wiki and you're off and running. And, because these applications are just regular JotSpot wiki pages, if you want to modify them to meet a specific need, go right ahead
Simple Reference Apps
- Parish Directory
- Event Calendar
- Meeting Manager
- ToDo List
- Call Log
Collaboration and Community
- Forum
- Blog
- Knowledge Base
- Submit Feedback
- Simple Poll
- Contact Manager
Project Management
- Project Management
- Feature Request Tracking
- Bug Reporter (New!)
- Engineering Activity Manager
Human Resources
- Recruiting
- Time and Expense Manager
CRM
- Customer Relationship Management
- Help Desk
- Contracts Management
Consumer Apps
- RSS Feed Aggregator
- My Favorites
- Check Register
How Create a Wiki
Wiki's are now created quite easily and therefore are growing exponentially. (See JotSpot. It takes about one minute!
If you have the ability to email, surf the web and use a standard wordprocess you can create a wiki.
If you can use Microsoft Word, you can use JotSpot. JotSpot's easy to use wiki editor means what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG). For advanced users, you can choose between WYSIWYG, ASCII markup and XML wiki editor modes. (Advanced users will know what that means but these options are by no means necessary.)
There are more sophisticated implementations of wiki technology (such as this Vincentian Encyclopedia) but JotSpot is currently the easiest to create for non-technical users.
Tutorials
At this moment in early January 2006 the best source for tutorials is JotSpot
- The tutorials are available as web pages or videos.
- Overview of what a wiki is General Tour
- Overview of possible uses for a wiki Applications
Related Technologies
Blogs or "web logs"
Using Video in pastoral ministry
