Google takes on Wikipedia with Knol. The web responds. Invite only, of course.
posted by Soup on Dec 14, 2007 - 121 comments

WiserEarth is a user-editable relational database that aspires to list, categorize, and describe every non profit and civil society organization on Earth. It currently includes 104,304 organizations which can be viewed by name, location, or areas of focus. You can perform complex searches. You can post (or search) jobs, events, and resources. You can discuss areas of focus, such as Urban Forestry, Evolutionary Ecology, or government oversight and reform. You can also visualize the networks connecting these areas of focus and the various organizations.
posted by alms on May 9, 2007 - 6 comments

Jazz '71-'89 Dave Douglas posed the challenge: “Is there a writer who can take on the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the Vietnam War?” The Bad Plus answered (though not unbiased). The Guardian and NY Times weighed in. Suck it, haters. And ultimately, Behearer used a wiki to answer the call.
posted by klangklangston on Feb 15, 2007 - 20 comments

Standup comedy cultural hot button Wikipedia hack. Standup comics! Need a cultural hot button topic for a joke? Check out Wikipedia articles with the most revisions. Comedy gold. Just pick a topic and start riffing.
posted by basilwhite on Nov 30, 2005 - 55 comments

The avatar versus the journalist. Ant farms, Bombay, the neolithic revolution, and Wikipedia.
posted by Tlogmer on Jul 22, 2005 - 18 comments

PBwiki is a super simple, extremely clean route to having, what you always wanted (admit it), your very own wiki. Just enter your username and email address, and wait for the password to be sent to you, and you're off and running. No need for your own web space, no messing around with CGI, PHP or Python, and if you're worried that the site will vanish and take your stuff with it, you can even download your entire wiki in a ZIP file. It's not the first free wiki farm out there, but it's just about as simple and clean as one can get.

But what do you do with it once you have one? I've been using a personal wiki for keeping track of ideas, places and characters for a (rather sprawling) novel project; the simplified page markup of a wiki combined with easy hyperlinking make them great for brainstorming. You could also start up a game of Lexicon, which is well-suited for play on a wiki, and as previously seen in these parts. Or, you know, you could just start your own Everything. (Originally found on bOINGbOING.)
posted by JHarris on Jun 4, 2005 - 17 comments

One of many Wikipedia-based applications, Omnipelagos mines the hive mind to map the connections between two things.
posted by jenh on May 10, 2005 - 31 comments

The Green Party of Canada's living platform is their party platform... in Wiki form! It seems that only party members are able to participate in the Wiki, but the rest of us are still able to rank a plank and vote for their platform's priorities in the next election. Once the election date is set, party administrators will form the input into some sort of rough fixed platform, but until then, it's "what real democracy looks like".
posted by DrJohnEvans on Apr 23, 2004 - 23 comments

Now class, please turn in your (meta)homework Several classes at Stanford have started relying on multimedia-intensive collaborative websites. A quick browse through the gallery and you will find classes that either rely on blogging or run entirely "wiki style" . While it seems thrilling to see students stimulate and build ideas off one another, will this concept ever filter down to your average high school class? It seems that the whole principle of wiki comes at odds to traditional conventions of authorship. Surprisingly, in this course, students can choose the option of being assessed solely on their experimental participation on the wiki site. When classwork consists of students adding and changing each other's comments, how would you grade each student individually? (By the way, there are a lot of pretty pictures in the gallery.)
posted by alex3005 on Oct 21, 2003 - 12 comments