Several years ago Michael Ivanov and Philip Neustrom started the Davis Wiki with a simple goal: collect all the interesting and amazing things they'd learned about Davis, California in one spot, and let other people help and build on what they knew. The Davis Wiki has become an awesome success, and today provides an invaluable resource in ways they couldn't have even imagined when they started.
As time passed, more and more folks came to them and asked about wikis for their communities. They took some preemptive steps toward helping out more communities, and helping out the Davis Wiki in turn, when they fundraised and purchased a server. Even then, though, they didn't really have the proper infrastructure to accommodate all of these different communities and do so in a way that let them have complete control over their wikis. What they've been working on will do just that.
They call this project 
Wiki Spot. It's a non-profit effort to let communities anywhere in the world initiate, maintain, publicize and fund wikis. They hope to provide a trusting home for wikis, encourage development of collaborative software, and promote adoption of the wiki as a tool for enriching communities. Basically, they're going to be doing what some of us have been doing all along, but with better, stronger infrastructure behind us.
After seeing the amazing things they've accomplished together with the Davis Wiki so far, they've all come to realize that wikis can be an invaluable asset for communities, and that's why they've been working hard to make sure that every community can do what they've been doing in Davis. They want the only barrier to success to be drive and vision — not technical know-how. They think that it's important that their communities have a safe, non-commercial home, too.
There's a lot of really terrific things they could talk about that make Wiki Spot special — like the way they're focused on making it easy to share and connect among communities — but you should go check stuff out for yourself, and read up about Wiki Spot.
The idea of collaboration and relatedness is one of the true benefits of wikis. I decided to start the Friendswood Wiki modeled after the Davis site to begin the process of sharing our communitiy ideas. Many thanks to Michael and Philip, all of the wiki developers and the enire wiki community.
Big idea: Interwiki community
One of the big ideas behind the Wiki Spot network of wikis is that they are an interconnected group of wikis. They've made it really really easy to watch changes on a bunch of different wikis you find interesting, and as Wiki Spot grows and provides a home to more communities you're bound to find this more useful.
You can watch the recent changes of many wikis at once using the Interwiki Recent Changes page and you can watch all of your bookmarks on the Interwiki Bookmarks page! Just click "watch this wiki" by your name in the upper right hand corner to, well, watch a wiki! You can do a lot of other cool stuff, so go explore!
Other stuff!
You can all now create a wiki, though you probably knew that if you got to this point, reading wise.
Interwiki links look slightly different, and are more like normal wiki links. They're now written with "double quotes" around the page name. For example:
[wiki:wikispot:A_Page_in_the_Wiki A Page in the Wiki]
is now:
[wiki:wikispot:"A Page in the Wiki"]
which displays as:
You might have noticed the interwiki icon looks different too. That's because all Wiki Spot wikis get their little logo included in all interwiki links. Non-Wiki Spot wikis keep the old icons, the interwiki community dudes. If you want to get complicated, you can even do interwiki redirects in much the same way (see Help with Linking).
Help Files (e.g. Help on Editing) have generally been moved from constituent wikis to the Wiki Spot hub — see Help with Editing there. The general reason is that it makes it much much easier to update if they ever add new features. Which they will. Most of these help files have been renamed and rewritten as well to remove the Engrish.
Links now work in Headings. Interwiki links too, even though they look a little funny.
Page Includes have gotten much simpler, and [[Include]] has basically replaced all of the functionality of [[IncludePages]] without being so damn confusing. See Help with Macros for details.
User Pages are now in a separate namespace — every user's homepage is now in ["Users/PersonName"]. This is done partially because Wiki Spot may get a ton of users, but it also makes the distinction between public pages and user pages more apparent, as this was a continual source of confusion here. You can choose to set up a single user page in User Settings.
Quick Edit is so awesome it gets its own page!
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 is the new license, an upgrade from 2.0. (All content before this date is still available under Creative Commons 2.0.)
