Wiki update

At the start of the course, I started a wiki using WetPaint for a charity I am involved with. I thought I would take the opportunity to update on the progress. The wiki was started simply by cutting and pasting from the original website. The website is about to be redesigned, to modernise and make more interactive. This has been partly driven by recent issues of comment spamming and a recent hack of the site which redirected it to porn prior to returning to the site with the people counter changed to "this site has been hacked: 1."

The wiki took a whole 2 hours to set up and email round the committee. The next day it was launched at a local history fair in Troon, Scotland and copies distributed to local family history socities. I don't really expect much from the committee as they are not IT literate in any way and many of the socities have now had their last meeting before the summer break.

The idea has been very well received and some one did take the opportunity to email everyone that has ever left a comment on the charity website. Again I have had a good response, but mainly in the form of emailed things to add, one person has left a list of local deaths from 1881 in the comments field and we have been contacted by a Professor from Glasgow University who thinks the project has great potential and is keeping a weather eye to see if any pre reformation information will be added.

Summary - lots of interest, very well received but people are not wanting to contribute directly. This may cause me alot of work in the long run trying to sort everything out. I've been experimenting with how to place family histories on the wiki and decided to take the course of a pager per individual to try to add character to the general rote.

Problems I have experienced -

It doesn't particularly like you deleting information i.e. pages or templates.
It stores the pages, in case you want to restore them at a later date. If you create a page in a wrong template, there doesn't appear to be a way to change it without manually deleting the field and retyping what it should be. You can not create a page with a duplicate name (this causes problems with individual names) and means if you delete a page you can not recreate a page with the same title.

This is not an ideal scenario, if someone posts coyrighted material then although it is removed from the site, I can not remove it from WetPaint. This concerns me as there was an issue a few years ago where we were granted permission to use pictures and then the owner recinded due to a new book being published with the material.

Apart form that I must say I like the package, though it can be occasionally slow to run. I just need to promote pages that will encourage people to give it a try.