Our new feature for public wikis who want global participation and editing on their wiki. Public editing allows anyone to immediately gain access to your wiki — users only have to click “edit” and create a PBwiki account.

This is great if you want everyone to have access and you don’t want the added step of approving everyone. Added benefit — you can create permission levels for these users and even remove them from the wiki.

Administers can turn on public editing in the settings panel. Look for ‘wiki security’ and chose ‘ Anyone can edit this wiki’

Check out these hugely popular wikis already using Public Editing:

• Usercontribution.Intuit.com
• Barcamp.org
• Twitter.pbwiki.com
• MobilecampNewDelhi.pbwiki.com

And they already LOVE it!

“The success of the BarCamp and Twitter wiki derives largely from the exceptional editing experience of PBWiki. So productive!” – Chris Messina

“We are using it on http://usercontribution.intuit.com and love it! Yay public editing ” – Jenny Spadafora

This feature is only available for 2.0 wikis. To gain access to this feature upgrade your 1.0 wiki by clicking the “Convert now” flag at the top of your wiki screen. Converting is easy, free and takes one minute!

How do you like your publicly editable wiki?

This month the PBwiki team debuted our freshly redesigned API at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup.

The PBwiki API is a way for developers to hook into wikis and work with their contents. Using our API, you can do just about anything you can do from your web browser: view pages and files, move stuff around, and edit pages — the works.

We even built our latest set of features – the Document Management release – using our API.

The show Nerdstalker caught up with Mark to hear more about how you can use the PBwiki API on your own wiki. Check out this short video:

The API is enabled by default on all 2.0 wikis, so you can get started right away. Go to your wiki’s settings and click Developer Interface. You’ll see the API keys you need to work with the API and a link to the documentation.

We’re excited to see what folks will build with the API – so be sure to send us your feedback and ideas.

Before joining the team at PBwiki, I co-founded a small internet startup in the entertainment industry. After a time of blood, sweat and tears, we were finally getting acquired by a larger start-up company. Needless to say, we were ecstatic and eager to get the process started.

Being a very small organization when we started, we didn’t have a lot of processes in place. Communication is less of an issue with fewer players. Unfortunately, the company acquiring us didn’t have much of a structure for us to adopt either, and things got very messy, very quickly. We tried to set up a weekly call, but poor attendance really limited the efficiency of those. We’d send a multitude of emails, but decisions, deadlines, and vital data would get lost or passed over. In short, it was a nightmare.

If I were writing this as a sales pitch, I would tell you now about how PBwiki solved all of our problems; I’m not, and it didn’t. What it did do was provide a great first step to getting things on track. We still send emails that get lost and wiki’s can’t make people attend conference calls, but they do provide a place to document all the decisions and progress that get made. There is no dispute about where the project is going or what both parties agreed upon. We have a clear source of truth to refer to.

PBwiki created a solution to get the project moving. It helped us to simplify a process that was getting much more complicated than it needed to be.  If only PBwiki could be used in all areas of life…

Chris the Teacher asked us how we can help make his free wiki look more appealing to his students.

Even a free wiki can be modified to fit in with your classroom or organization. Here are two tips I gave Chris on how to customize a free wiki. This is my tip of the week.

How do you rearrange your wiki to better suit your style?

Jason Samuelian is a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho who introduced wikis to volunteers throughout the nine current Southern Africa countries that have Peace Corps volunteers. You can check out his public wiki here. Here is Jason’s case study, in his own words.

So, why did you need a wiki?
You see what we are trying to do is build a space on the internet where the volunteers can share information and ideas on how to further the development projects in their countries. We are doing this outside the confines of Peace Corps Washington and therefore it is on our measly salaries to get this thing off and running.

How are you using your PBwiki?
We are using PBwiki to provide resources for Peace Corps volunteers in the Southern African region. Such as the sharing of project ideas, resources, recipes, weather, experiences we have faced, etc. The main purpose behind the wiki though is too make volunteers more successful in their service by giving the easy access to volunteer ideas and information that has already been field tested by their predecessors.

How has using a wiki changed the work you do for the Peace Corps?
The Peace Corps does give us a significant amount of initial training and they provide computers for us to work on throughout our service. The common practice though by most volunteers has been to make say a lesson plan or an outline of how to run a sports camp to raise awareness to HIV/AIDS.

However the two components have never been brought together. What we thought would be helpful was to make this information available to people before the even come to the country. This way we could get the new volunteers thinking about what they might want to try and give them ideas after they have gotten to their site and maybe been discouraged by a failed project or idea.

(more…)

Most people at your company have never even heard of a wiki, so how do you get them to actually use it?

Raoul Kahn, Director of Product at Seesmic, had the same problem that many of you face at your own company. Here is his advice on encouraging wiki adoption – particularly with non-technical people.

The Breakdown

:35 – How to get non-technical people involved
1:56 – Three ways Seesmic uses their business wiki
2:46 – Who used the wiki immediately (hint: no one) and how to get people on board
3:22 – How to explain to non-technical people why and how to use a wiki.

“It’s made my job so much easier. I can look at one site, where ever I am and I know what’s going on”

How do you encourage people at your company to use a wiki?

Wikis work best as a collaborative site where many people have access to read and contribute. Your job is to find people to contribute to the wiki — our job is to make it super simple for you to invite them.

Check out the many ways PBwiki 2.0 has made it easy to add folks to you wiki – including our new completely public wiki (coming soon!).

Individual invitations – Start small – add just one or two users. You can do this from the front page of your wiki, just enter their email address where is says “share this wiki”.

Add multiple users- If you have an excel or .csv file with users email addresses, you can bulk upload them using the “add multiple users” feature in the users section of the setting panel. This works wonders — just copy all the email addresses and paste them into the space provided.

Classroom Accounts- Your students don’t have email and you want to know exactly who is editing the wiki. Use Classroom Accounts to automatically create login accounts for your students and determine their permission level.

Request Access- You can send the link to your wiki and have your users click request access. Then approve them in the setting panel. This is good if you want specific folks to have access to your wiki, but don’t want to add them individually.

Coming Soon — Public editing – We are now testing a public editing feature for public wikis. This feature will allow anyone who has your wiki address to immediately gain access to your wiki — they only have to click “edit” and create a PBwiki account.

NOTE:This is not available for private wikis

Public editing is good for large collaborative wikis where you want everyone to have access and you don’t want the added step of approving everyone. Added benefit — you can create permission levels for these users and even remove them from the wiki.

What more could you ask for? In the comments tell us how you’re using your PBwiki and what features you would like to see.

When you think of taking a vacation cruise, you probably think of all the food you’ll eat, shuffle board you’ll play, and booze you’ll drink. But what do the folks running the ship think about? My bet is they think about some of the same things I think about everyday: keeping the ship operating smoothly, charting a halcyon course, and making sure that process never enters the minds of its customers. Come with me for a tour of the ship we pilot for the pleasure voyage we like to call pbwiki.com.

“Safety first” isn’t just the mantra of cruise liners and middle school crossing guards, we take it seriously here, too. Your data is kept on three different PBwiki machines, then additionally encrypted and backed up off-site. How much data are we talking about? Your average desktop computer can hold about 200GB of data, of which about 6GB is your illegal music collection. We track over 25 times that amount: 5400GB of your data. In the past year we’ve had to triple the number of servers we use to store it all!

Engines are pretty important to cruise ships, but they’re also complicated and can break down. Putting in multiple engines is difficult and expensive, but it’s worth it: if one breaks down, you’ve got a spare. PBwiki is the same way with computers. Over the last year, we’ve worked to add “hot standby” servers that automatically take over if another computer experiences a failure. Ever wish you could just switch computers when Word or Windows crashes and pick up where you left off? With PBwiki you can!

Captains don’t drive a ship blindfolded, and neither do we. Earlier this year we fully instrumented our machines and services with a program called “ganglia.” It takes measurements and displays them on our dashboard so we can detect problems and calculate trends. The graph at left shows the effects of adding RAM to a beleaguered backup database: CPU usage drops and we are even more prepared in the unlikely event of a problem.

Although calling it a “captain’s log” would evoke too many Star Trek jokes, our Operations team logs all changes to the service, so we have a point of reference when tracking down performance issues, or to make sure certain checks were made. We keep it on PBwiki itself and simply call it the “log.”

Of course, this metaphor only goes so far: I haven’t yet secured the right to use deadly force to suppress piracy and mutiny. Apparently that would be against the “laws” and we haven’t relocated to my ideal office in international waters. Join me next time when we go into more technical details about PBwiki’s commitment to operational excellence!

Join the PBwiki Back to School Challenge to earn a free gold upgrade, plus the chance to win tons of classroom resources.

In addition to earning awesome classroom swag — legos, books, and gift certificates for school supplies — the PBwiki Back to School Challenge will teach you how to:

• Build an interactive website – add video and images to your existing lessons
• Develop group projects and encourage collaboration and participation
• Find out how other educators have built their wiki

The Back to School Challenge is the best way to learn how to use your wiki and earn a free upgrade along the way.