The Invisible Wiki

Everyone knows what a wiki looks like: Wikipedia, right?

And everyone knows what a wiki is for: letting anyone contribute, right?

Well, not necessarily. A wiki engine (the software used to create and run wikis like Wikipedia) doesn’t actually care if you use it to make a “proper” wiki or not. 

In fact, since wiki engines allow some users access to edit pages and stop others, what if you only allowed yourself access? Do you then still have a wiki? Or just a really easy-to-edit web site? One that you can edit from anywhere you can get to the internet?

But what about the plain-vanilla wiki look? What about the history/revision links, last edit information, and all the other clues that the user is looking at a wiki engine? 

Enter our friend the CSS stylesheet, and one of our favorite commands,

{display:none;}

Voila! Restrict access and hide the wiki features, and you have an easy-to-edit, open-source-powered web site. A few examples:

http://www.yanb.be
http://www.ifccc.org
http://nitens.org/taraborelli

OK, so they still look pretty plain, but they certainly don’t look like wikis. And with some CSS trickery, they can look like anything you want.

A wiki engine is simply that: an engine. And like any engine, it provides power; what you do with it is only limited by your ideas.

Here’s a quick tutorial to get started (specifically using the Wikka engine, but the concepts involved will work with most others):

http://docs.wikkawiki.org/InvisibleWiki

And a quick video tutorial:

How to run an invisible wiki from AcademicProductivity on Vimeo