You may be thinking, why on earth would I want to create a website that anyone in the world can come along to and vandalize?  How can I possibly control the content of a wiki? 

Wikis are, by design, collaborative and open places.  This has its benefits, but clearly, there are drawbacks.  Wikipedia may be more well known for the flack it has gotten over its "uncontrolled" content issues than for its successes.  So how can a wiki creator keep content safe and secure?

Members and Permissions Wetpaint Wikispaces PBWiki Notification Wikispaces Wetpaint  PBWiki Privacy versus Promotion PBWiki Wetpaint Wikispaces Netiquette

Members and Permissions

When you create a wiki, editing options are limited to registered users to those who have a password. 

Wetpaint

• Who can view your website?

  • Everyone: A public site allows anyone on the web to discover, explore and join your site

  • Invited members:  A private site is only viewable by people you invite.

• Who can edit your website?

  • Anyone, even anonymously. Anyone can comment, edit, or add pages on your site, even anonymously.

  • Anyone who joins your wiki.  There are no anonymous edits allowed, but anyone who joins the wiki can edit or add pages on your site.

  • Only invited members.  There are no anonymous edits allowed. Only people you invite as writers can add or edit pages on your site.

• Who can make comments on your website?

  • Anyone, even anonymously. This setting is best when you want to encourage as many people as possible to post comments to your site.

  • Only members. This setting is best when you want people to be accountable for the comments they post to your site.

• Administrators can make changes to members' roles, as well-- contributor, moderator, adminstrator.

• OpenID lets you join and sign in to participating web sites with a single ID and password.

   

Wikispaces

• Who can edit?  Who can view?

  • Public Everyone - including anonymous visitors - can view and edit pages

  • Protected Everyone can view pages, only members of this space can edit pages

  • Private Only members of this space can view and edit pages-- requires paid upgrade to Plus Plan

• Who can comment?

  • Discussion persmissions can be adjusted by administrator with the click of a button-- allow non-members to comment, or restrict to members.

PBWiki

• Who can edit?  Who can view?

  • A public wiki allows anyone to see your content-- password required to edit.

  • A private wiki is not accessible to the public-- password required to edit. 

     

• Access Controls

Access controls allow the adminstrator to give different levels of access to different users-- available with premium wikis only

• Administrators-- the wiki creator has total control over the wiki including the ability to create, delete and make changes to all parts of the wiki

• Moderators-- can delete pages and files, including revisions and revision histories

• Contributors-- contributors can edit pages and revert pages to previous versions. They can also upload new files and create new pages.

• Readers-- Readers cannot make any modifications at all to a wiki. They only can read the pages, RSS feeds, and files.

Notification

Wikispaces

• Recent changes-- page, date and author information available on the website

• Notify me-- allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds for Page Edits and/or Page Discussion

Wetpaint

• RSS updates:

  • New Pages

  • Recently Updated Pages

  • Recent Comments

• Email Notifications

  • Activity Alerts

  • News & Feature Updates

  • Community Messaging

 PBWiki

• RSS updates

  • available wiki-wide (at page level for premium accounts)

  • automatically available to all

  • enabled by default

• Email Notifications

  • editors have notification options

  • administrators can view who is set to receive notifications

Privacy versus Promotion

If you have a private website, only viewable by invited members, you don't have to worry about your site's appearance in search engine results-- any links will not result in visible content.  If you have a public or protected site that anyone can view, you can still control how your site is indexed.

PBWiki

You can enable indexing on Google and Yahoo with a click of a button on your wiki's access controls.  The default is "enabled", meaning that your wiki can be found (though not always quicly or easily) via a search on Google.

Promote your wiki on another website, a blog or from within Blackboard using PBWiki badges (visual links to your wiki)-- several styles available.

Wetpaint

Use Privacy settings to limit views of your wiki.  A private wiki will not be indexed.

Wikispaces

Wikispaces allows you to set a description telling visitors about your space; if your space is public or protected, this description will appear in the site-wide directory. If you do not set a description, or if your space is private, your space will not appear in the directory.

Wikispaces also provides several linked image badges for your website, homepage or for placement within Blackboard.  They also offer a "Live Changes Badge" which will provide links to changes on your space as they occur-- a great way to keep users up-to-date.

Netiquette

You can avoid having your wiki vandalized by trolls or erupting into flame-wars by clearly setting parameters of behavior within which your contributors must work.  Here are some suggestions:

• Create guidelines for behavior, content, deletion, and editing.

• Explicitly state what is not acceptable

• Establish a forum for dealing with problems should they arise

Wikipedia has dealt with every type of bad behavior that can manifest itself on a wiki, so take a few minutes to look through their guidelines and wikiquette.

For further information, Gerald Baily and Mike Ribble of Kansas State have compiled an excellent website full of resources on the topic of Digital Citizenship including, but not at all limited to, etiquette issues.