Wikidot
| File:Wikidot-logo.png | |
Screenshot | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
Type of site | Online website builder |
| Available in | Afrikaans, Arabic, Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese |
| Founded | August 1, 2006 |
| Headquarters | , |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | Michał Frąckowiak |
| Key people | Michał Frąckowiak (CEO and Founder, former COO) Pieter Hintjens (former CEO) |
| Industry | Internet |
| Services | Wiki hosting Social networking |
| Employees | 4 |
| Website | www.wikidot.com www.wikidot.org |
| Advertising | Google AdSense |
| Registration | Free, Required (to create a wiki) |
| Users | over 3000000 |
| Launched | August 1, 2006 |
| Current status | Active |
Wikidot Inc. is a Polish wiki hosting corporation which owns, operates and supports the community of wiki-based web projects at Wikidot.com, a social networking service and wiki hosting service (or wiki farm), developed in Toruń, Poland. Wikidot.com was launched on August 1, 2006 and in 2009 it was the world's third-largest wiki farm,[1] with 3,000,000 users running 150,000 sites with 61 million pages of user-created content (as of January 8, 2018).[citation needed] Wikidot.com grows by about 3000-4000 new users each day. Wikidot.com roughly doubled in size during 2011.[2]
Company history[edit]
Wikidot.com is owned and operated by Wikidot Inc., incorporated in Delaware, USA in 2007 by Wikidot.com founder Michał Frąckowiak and a group of private investors, and originally developed in Poland. Wikidot Inc. derives revenue from opt-in advertising and services including support licenses. The company's operational offices are located in Toruń, Poland.[1]
The founding officers of the company were Pieter Hintjens (CEO) and Michał Frąckowiak, who is presently General Manager of the Polish operating office. Pieter Hintjens was CEO of iMatix Corporation, past President of the FFII, and was active in the free and open-source software field since 1991. Michał Frąckowiak is a former astrophysicist, certified software developer and the architect and lead developer of the Wikidot.com project since 2006.[1] On February 26, 2010, Pieter left the CEO position in Wikidot to continue his work in iMatix[3]
Wikidot has been consistently placed in the top 10,000 web sites by Alexa since the beginning of 2008, and is currently ranked in the top 5,000.[4]
Wikidot Inc. released Wikidot.org in January 2008, the official FOSS version of the Wikidot.com software project with an Ajax-based interface.[5] The release was planned as a stable and free hosting software for single wiki instances or wiki farms on a GNU/Linux computer. The FOSS Wikidot.org software is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. There are Debian/Ubuntu (*.deb) packages available for the software. However, development ceased in August 2009,[6] and the final release may break existing Wikidot installations.[7]
From March 2008, Wikidot.com began offering pro account features to beta testers, and on December 17, 2008, Wikidot.com rolled out Pro accounts availability to all users.[8]
Starting in January 2011, Wikidot.com began offering a multilingual model on an experimental wiki-basis, by inviting the worldwide community to translate most used commands, help-text and other literals from English to "every wished" language. After a week, some languages like German, French and Serbian were translated 100% by the community, and Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Finnish, Italian are following now and growing in their completeness. This is now available on a per-site basis and enables user-based translation to an arbitrary number of languages.[citation needed]
Software and features[edit]
Originally conceived as a pure wiki, the Wikidot engine today has grown beyond its original scope as a web application framework. It provides page templates, similar to MediaWiki, page statistics, and structured data forms. Community Wikidot projects built by users include: calendars, chatrooms, issue trackers, blogs, and even MediaWiki emulations.
Wikidot.com supports limitless pages and users.[9] Users can apply SSL encryption, map their wiki to an existing domain (other than wikidot.com), customize privacy settings, assign roles, and interact in wiki-specific forums. Wikidot sites support rich embeds, including content from YouTube, SoundCloud and other content hosts.[10]
Wikidot.com uses a custom wiki engine that was released as free software under the terms of the Affero General Public License.[11] The software is written in PHP and is notable for doing extensive caching to reduce database accesses. Wikidot.org is a FOSS wikifarm software, see Comparison of wiki farms, and a number of competing wikifarm services use it, such as Wikicomplete.info.[12]
On the 30th August 2012, Wikidot announced plans began migration from their traditional datacenter operated by SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. to Amazon.com's EC2. This was completed on the 4th of September 2012.[13] Static files like CSS Stylesheets, User Avatars and JavaScript files are delivered through Amazon CloudFront and DNS services are provided by Amazon Route 53.[14] Since the 12th September, Wikidot also stores user file uploads directly on Amazon's S3 storage system.[15] Regular database backups are also made and stored on S3 to ensure data durability.[16]
Wikidot became a finalist and first prize winner in the AWS Global Start-Up Challenge of 2012 under the category of Consumer Applications.[17]
Wikidot uses an open source modified Text_Wiki software (engine). Each site gets a subdomain on .wikidot.com (like mywiki.wikidot.com). Site owners can also map custom domains[9] (like mywiki.com – if previously registered by the wiki owner). There is also a list of subdomains registered by Wikidot for users, which provides an alternate wiki URL without requiring the user to buy a domain name beforehand.[18] One can optionally allow Wikidot to display ads on their wiki and take 80% of revenue.[9][19] Other possibilities are RSS import/export,[9] private RSS feeds for Users (notifications and watched items), RSS for page changes and forum, customizable themes which also can be styled by adjusting Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),[9] advanced forum for each Site, custom page hierarchies, powerful search engine, advanced page edit locking (full/section/append), IP and username blocking.
Until December 17, 2008, Wikidot offered only a free service and, unlike other free wiki hosts, it had no advertising or premium service.[20] On December 17, 2008 Wikidot introduced premium accounts.[8] There are three types of premium accounts: Pro-Lite, Pro and Pro+. The difference is in price and quantity of pro features offered.[21][22]
Any account level may create open, closed or private wikis. Open and Closed wikis are visible to everyone on the Internet, with Open wikis available for any registered Wikidot member to join, and Closed wikis having restricted membership rules. Private wikis are only visible to members and Wikidot users added to the site's extra access list.
The service supports markdown editing, tag clouds, a flexible permission system, custom themes, and the ability to generate revenue through Google AdSense [19] which is not obligatory for free sites.[9]
Wikidot also provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for third-party developers to interact and manipulate pages through the XML-RPC protocol. All paid users are automatically provided with two API keys (a read-only and a read-write key), however free users can also request for them via a request page on their Developers Wiki.[23]
Features[edit]
Advantages:
- Each site gets its own subdomain on wikidot.com
- Permission system suitable for both public and private wikis which can be tweaked
- Customizable themes to create a unique look and feel[19]
- Numerous widgets available to embed in the wiki[19]
- Generate revenue through different advertising programs including Google AdSense[19][24]
- Extensive documentation and community support forum
Disadvantages (as of November 2020):
- Time to time user needs to reload page several times for some JavaScript elements and wiki tools (adding tags, editing pages, showing discussion pages) to work. It may be caused by growing amount of wikis and users
- Page's source code can't be longer than 200000 symbols (including spaces and other special characters; this can be circumvented by wiki tools)
- Only 300MB of local data storage for free wiki (however, user can link files, such as images, from external sources)
Wikidot community[edit]
Wikidot end users have worked together to build large parts of the service. Initially, this was a community support effort,[25] a code snippets sharing site[26] (for reusable pieces of code), and a multilingual handbook.[27] At present, there are German, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Indonesian, Romanian and Portuguese Handbooks.
Today, the Wikidot user community also makes themes,[28] packages,[29] dashboards, roadmaps, site templates,[30] and reusable applications. In October 2009 Wikidot launched a competition for a new user-designed home page.[31] Many of these community projects are released as these reusable building blocks licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. New features can be requested using the Wishlist.[32]
Each user has a "karma" level, which is an indicator of that user's activity and engagement. The highest karma level ("Guru") indicates that a user is a long-term and is active member of the website.[33]
Wikidot interface in other languages[edit]
At launch, the Wikidot user interface was available in English and in Polish. At the beginning of 2011, Wikidot launched an experimental project "Translate Wikidot".[34] The project relies on volunteers translating Wikidot interface elements to their native languages, to make the service more approachable by users who do not speak English or Polish.[35] Translators received one-year Pro+ accounts as a reward.[36] Finished translations include Serbian[37] French and German,[38] Italian, Finnish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean[39]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "About us". Wikidot. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Stats Archive". Wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "The Big Cheese Moves". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Alexa statistics data for Wikidot". Alexa.com. Retrieved 18 November 2020.
- ↑ "Wikidot.org Home page". wikidot.org. Retrieved October 13, 2011.
- ↑ Gabryjeluk, Piotr (2009-08-09). "Wikidot on GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved 2020-11-18.
- ↑ "Wikidot Debian Ubuntu Packages". wikidot.org. Retrieved October 13, 2011.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Michał Frąckowiak: Pro accounts and a few ideas". Michalfrackowiak.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 "Wikidot Features". Wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ Internal Wikis – Wikidot.com at www.laptopmag.com Access date: October 11, 2009
- ↑ "License". Wikidot.org. January 30, 2008. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ Wikicomplete.info
- ↑ "Wikidot moving 1,000 miles NE next week". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved October 1, 2012.
- ↑ After switching to Amazon Route 53 our DNS responses are served 3 times faster.
- ↑ New: All users' files in Wikidot storage has been moved to Amazon S3
- ↑ All the files are securely hosted on Amazon S3 and we only cache them locally. All the "missing" files are stored fine in our S3 bucket. We are trying to find out why the hell they are not being downloaded and served by our servers.
- ↑ "Wikidot wins First Prize at AWS Global Startup Challenge 2012!". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved January 25, 2013.
- ↑ Wikify.me list of domain names
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 "Wikidot review at About.com". Webtrends.about.com. September 29, 2011. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ Dan Woods; Peter Thoeny (2007). Wiki for Dummies. Indiana: Willey Publishing. p. 101. ISBN 9780470043998. Search this book on
- ↑ "Wikidot pricing". Wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ Wikidot, crea wikis de forma sencilla y rápida March 25, 2009 desarrolloweb.com Access date: October 11, 2009
- ↑ "API Methods". Wikidot Inc. August 19, 2012. Retrieved December 28, 2012.
- ↑ "More advertising options for pro. Free sites stay ad-supported". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Community site". Community.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Snippets site". Snippets.wikidot.com. September 19, 2009. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Handbook". Handbook.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Themes site". Themes.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Packages site". Packages.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Iron Giant project". Irongiant.wikidot.com. October 21, 2009. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Get Wikidot! announcement". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Wishlist". Feedback.wikidot.com. September 16, 2010. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "A Wikidot site for karma cheating". Wikidot user 'big fatty yumi'. Retrieved August 6, 2020."Karma". Wikidot. July 7, 2010. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Blog. On the top of Babel tower. Jan 7, 2011". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Translate Wikidot Site – The site where the translations take place". Translate.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Blog: Wikidot translations week sum-up: Pro+ accounts given away! Jan 21, 2011". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Translate Wikidot/Serbian Translation". Translate.wikidot.com. January 14, 2011. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Wikidot Blog. Babel Tower grows, Jan 17, 2011". Blog.wikidot.com. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
- ↑ "Translate Wikidot/Stats". Translate.wikidot.com. January 28, 2012. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
External links[edit]
This article "Wikidot" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Wikidot. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
