Wiki, Wiki, Wiki

Oi! Oi! Oi!

The Wikipedia site, and various spin-offs, seems to have suddenly become very popular. It's an interesting concept, if you haven't come across it yet I'd definitely suggest going to have a look. It looks like an ordinary encyclopaedia site, but information can be added to it by anyone. There's always the danger that people will make stuff up, so it shouldn't be taken as completely accurate, but it is very informative, and I do have to be careful not to get sidetracked when I'm looking at it. There are lots of links to other sections on every page so if I start clicking on them I can be lost for the afternoon!

A friend started using a site called pbwiki for a project he's doing, and now I'm using it for my book. I had a bit of a disaster 6 months ago when my old PC died and I didn't have everything backed-up onto floppies. Thankfully I had hard-copies but it still meant I had to type it all in again. My pbwiki site means that I can store all my research and my writing online instead of on my hard-drive. They back up their site offline twice-hourly, and I regularly download a zipfile of my work as well to keep all the information on my PC just in case.

It's much better than having lots of Word documents on my computer because I can link pages to each other to keep everything tidy but easily accessible. The index page means I can find anything I need within seconds. It's very cool.

The site is password protected but if you give the password to someone they can contribute to it as well. That aspect isn't really useful for me, it depends what you're using the site for, and obviously you could only give it to people you trust otherwise they could go on and delete everything!!

I think it's giving me more incentive to write because I can see all the work I've already done straight away. It would be such a shame to waste it all by giving up.