I’ve been fascinated with a technology known as ***Wiki|http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiHistory*** since last summer when I was at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference. Conference attendees created a ***sort of unofficial website|http://oscon.kwiki.org/***, where they exchanged all sorts of information, from reviews of local restaurants to job postings to requests for roommates to personal biographies to notes on tutorial sessions. I maintained my own ***personal page|http://oscon.kwiki.org/index.cgi?PeterWood*** on that site. It was a lot of fun and very, very helpful.

Put simply, a Wiki is a website that everyone contributes to. Anyone can view the pages, anyone can edit the pages. Yes, that’s right… anyone. You don’t need a username or password. You just edit the page. Hard to believe, but true.

One of the coolest pieces of Wiki technology, which I use on a daily basis, is the ***Wikipedia|http://www.wikipedia.org/***. It’s an evolving, growing, free Wiki-based encyclopedia, with articles on everything from ***Oak Bluffs|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Bluffs%2C_Massachusetts*** to ***Star Trek|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_trek***.

I’ve set up a Wiki for the World Wide Wood website. ***Take a look|http://prwdot.org/wiki/*** at it, play around with it, contribute to it. I’ll be playing around with it too, so keep an eye out for changes. If you’re the RSS type, there’s an RSS feed of ***recent major changes|http://prwdot.org/wiki/index.php/RecentChanges?format=rss*** to the Wiki. For more granularity, there’s an RSS feed of ***all recent major and minor edits|http://prwdot.org/wiki/index.php/RecentEdits?format=rss*** to the Wiki.

Enjoy!