I have been interested in Wiki's for the last couple years, putting up an instance of UseModWiki on Aug 30th, 2002. I have mentioned several times that I like the free form accidental linking and quick content production of wiki. What I don't like about wiki is often the messy pages that it produces which overwhelm the average person with too much text. That was when I explored blogging for its easy of use and popularity. I have spent much time exploring [drupal] and its use of taxonomy to build and share knowledge by the use of categories. But have always felt that something in between would make a lot of sense.

Recently a conversation with [enigma] and his need to find and set up a wiki for use by CS folks at his University, has brought wiki to the front of my mind again. I still have a horribly complex twiki up for my homepage at work, and would like to do something about it.

The most successful wiki of course, beyond the original Ward Cunningham c2 wiki, is wikipedia.org. The introduction of "free linking", not using CamelCase for wiki linking and other site structure and design have cause it to be quite user friendly and successful at promoting content production.

Other useful wiki sites using the same engine and ran by the same folks include Wiktionary, the free dictionary, wikibooks, the free textbook project, and wikiquote, the quote repository.

I haven't explored any of these others much, but did come across a very humorous quote from Linus Torvalds. Well at least its funny if you have every followed Linux Kernel development.

"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well." (2000) LKML