Wetpaint – have your own wiki in just 2 minutes
Wetpaint is not a painting service but a wiki-system. And one of the best out there. Unlike most of its competitors, Wetpaint’s system is faster, better looking and a lot easier to use.
Their motto states it all: Creating your own Wetpaint wiki in as easy as 1,2,3. Cause yes, you can set up your own wiki in just 3 simple steps, that should not take you more than 2 minutes to complete. Here’s mine for example.
Wetpaint is not a fully customizable Wiki and can not be hosted on your own server, but it’s free and pretty good looking, thanks to the number of templates you can use for your page. Being free comes with a price though: a 160 x 600px Google Ads cell on the left sidebar. But come on, that’s not such a big deal.
This free wiki uses a great user interface. It’s a WYSIWYG editor, with just the basic functions, perfectly suited for the ordinary wiki contributor that lacks advanced knowledge of HTML. If you are a savvy webmaster and this thing bothers you, think about your readers/users. Using complicated styles and features will only be translated in countless hours spent fixing what your contributors made wrong. And not from malevolence, simply because they weren’t able to use the advanced functions properly. Thus, keeping the system simple saves you from a lot of headache.
Wetpaint wiki management system is suited for mass wikis, where every user can bring its contribution, but can also be used as a private/invite only wiki. This way, if you need a specific wiki for your employees for example, or for your school, Wetpaint is exactly what you were looking for.
In the end, all you have to do is give Wetpaint a try . I could be rumbling here for hours about it, but the only way you’ll be truly convinced of its quality and usability is by making your own Wiki. In the worst case, you would have lost 2 minutes of your life. But i assure you, once you gave Wetpaint a try, it will become your favourite hosted wiki system out there.
I enjoyed this post. I myself have never heard of the wetpaint wiki management system and it seems quite decent. I think I will check it out!
Thanks for the insight!
What do you use this for? Is there a live example that I can look at?
I use google docs. Here is an example of a collection of some ideas:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcf67qxf_67ddrw8t
You use this wiki solution for a wiki site of course
In other words, for content sites where most of the writing is done by readers… things like this
I just opened my Wet Paint account and it was very easy and FREE.
Looks great. Wonder if the afsense block is yours ?
It’s note yours, it’s theres. Every free thing comes with a catch