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.
PBworks Official Blog 
I am so happy to have the new classroom accounts. I have several people that I just want to give a username and password to. This makes it so much easier.
The “Coming Soon — Public editing” surprisedme. It is funny that you go from one extreme of requiring lots of hoops to be able to edit to adding open access. I think the option of open access is great, but I would also like one step back. I like the version 1 senerio of setting a wiki password, so anyone with that password can edit.
I like the “anyone can edit” option. I think that there are definitely perils involved though — and so better management tools for wiki admins are needed… in order to make it easier to undo a single user’s edits across many pages… It should also be mandatory to create an account (which, with OpenID, is much easier) so that it’s easier to ban offenders.
A better “activity stream” style view of edits would also be useful — especially combining multiple people’s edits of a single page into a single activity.
Finally, making permissions cascade based on folder hierarchies would be useful too… perhaps each user would get their own Sandbox to try things out in… and perhaps it would be useful to create, in the case of the BarCamp wiki, a folder called “Events” which would be an “anyone can edit pages in this folder” folder… but top level pages would require elevated permissions…
Thoughts?
Really happy to see the “Coming Soon — Public editing” – this kind of functionality has been missing since PBWiki 1.0 invite keys, and it will be great to have something similar.
“What more could you ask for?”
1. Easy: Please edit the templates to add the ACCESSKEY support back that was in PBWiki 1.0 (E = Edit, P = Preview, S = Save, C = Cancel)
2. Harder: Please ensure full fidelity roundtripping of any/all HTML elements and attributes that are not manipulated by the WYSIWYG editing tools (e.g. “class” attributes on all elements, “rel” on hyperlinks, etc.)
Thanks!
Tantek
This is a great feature!
Please bring back the 1.0 feature of just being able to assign an invite key with the ability to assign access levels. When dealing with multible teachers that may or may not be known to you, this is a great feature.
I am looking forward to the public access feature.
It would make creating a page or a wiki so much easier…Classroom accounts are great for young kids, but University students want more freedom and feel better signing in themselves..
so do adults who are students
Maggi
I am thrilled to be on alpha…and hope to learn many more great things
Maggi
Public editing for more mature participants is fine, but last year I had an experience with smut being liberally applied to a site for a New Testament class. This leaves me a firm believer in a hierarchy of permissions. So let us be able to keep a firm hand on who can edit, please.
Could we have an Edit button/tab at the bottom of the page as well as the top? This would be a time-saver, for sure.
Last but not least, could we have some way of uploading significant numbers of photos to our wiki pages. One of my wikis is an archaeology site for work between colleagues in the US, Europe, and Israel, and this would be most valuable. There are files totaling about 3,000 photos which I would like others to have access to and at present cannot.
Hi there,
It sounds like the request access feature is best for your public wiki. With request access you must approve every user who wants to gain access to your wiki.
If you want tight control over the users on your wiki, turn off ‘request access’ and make sure to invite your users by email.
-Kristine