Ever wanted to make a wiki for your school? Perhaps you wanted to keep up-to-date pages for the various clubs and organizations on campus (which are notoriously bad at keeping their websites up to date), or you wanted a list of the best places to get takeout food late at night.

At any rate, you no longer have any excuse for delaying, because Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia fame wants to help you start a wiki community for your university! This seems to me like a fundamentally good idea. Here’s part of the press release:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, today called upon all free culture enthusiasts to establish a collaborative community for their university on Students Wikia (http://students.wikia.com). The free, fully editable, worldwide, go-to guide to universities is looking for the people who know universities best – students like you – to become the leaders of each university wiki worldwide. Wikia has launched an exclusive students-only wiki tool as part of university wiki that allows only students from your university to edit. Request your own and become the founder for your school!

“Conventional resources, like university Web sites and brochures, are great for information gathering at the surface level, but for students looking for current, under-the-radar tips and tricks that only other students would know, wikis are the way to go,” said Tristan Harris, founder of http://Stanford.wikia.com. “The beauty of creating a wiki for your university on Wikia is that anyone can check out information on your school, but only those students who’ve experienced the school, programs and ‘extracurricular’ activities can edit the content — meaning, you don’t have to worry about spammers.”

Only time will tell if this will catch on or not, but if you want it to catch on, you should sign up to found a wiki at your college! Perhaps with the help of your peers, you can make this as good a resource for your college as Wikipedia is for everything else ;-) For more information, see the main Students Wiki website.

technorati tags:wikis

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