In my many travels around town, I’ve been hearing that “this town needs some site where we people can easily make announcements, show their worth, and generally inform people about our home town.” The idea of a wiki came up in this regard more than once.
Two elements have been missing where I live (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) : 1) A good clear brand to catch people’s attention and 2) Someone to just make it happen.
Well, two elements have been missing until now. . . announcing the dawn of Wikifax, the Halifax wiki. Already there is a good amount of information and an amazing number of edits for a service that has only been out there 2 days or so.
If you didn’t already know, a wiki is a website that can be editted by anyone. The most famous Wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. In fact, Wikifax uses the same content system that Wikipedia uses (it’s called MediaWiki), so if you are familiar with one, you will be familiar with the other.
Letting anyone edit the site is great because it enables a great deal of content to be added to the website without the bottlenecks that come about as you hire people to create copy, edit information, fix typos etc. The only disadvantage is that wikis can turn into rotten messes if they do not have enough people engaged to “prune the bushes” and keep things organized. That’s why I’m promoting this thing — because Wikifax needs you to help make sure it doesn’t end up looking like my office desk.
Now, for my geeky purposes, I hope the wikifax people will look into providing a little api of sorts, so I can bring the content to the websites I manage. How’s about it, Wikifax?
