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Signing up for PBWorks

Page history last edited by Justin Spratt 13 years, 4 months ago

Why you should sign up for PBworks


According to Wikipedia, a wiki is a "website that uses wiki software, allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked Web pages, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor, within the browser".  You should sign up for PBworks because making a wiki using PBworks' version of the wiki editor is "easier than making a peanut butter (PB) sandwitch" (according to PBworks).   If you are not sure how a wiki would differ from, say, a blog, see the section below entitled "What makes a thing a wiki?" (an amusingly constructed question posed by you-know-who-you-are).

 

Wiki's are a far more efficient way to collaborate on projects than email, and, in my experience, any project that needs more than 10 pieces of email should either be hosted on a wiki or discussed in a synchronous form of communication.  Typically, if the email correspondence includes a lot of reference information, that information should be wiki-hosted.  On the other hand, if the email correspondence is more of a conversation, the information should be exchanged through a more synchronous medium such as via instant messaging or phone.

 

Take a look at this video to get an idea of how PBworks allows you to collaborate in an efficient manor.  With PBworks, you can setup notification emails to alert you when a page has been changed by another editor.

 

 

How to sign up for PBworks


In order to create an account at PBworks, go the the create a PBworks account page and enter your credentials.  Be sure to use a strong password.  It is important to enter the same email address that you have given to the PBwiki owners that you have requested to grant you access to their site.  For example, if you have asked Bob to grant johndoe@gmail.com access to Bob's wiki, and then you sign up with doe.john@gmail.com on the create a PBworks account page, you will not be able to use that account to login to Bob's wiki.

 

The create a PBworks account page should look similar to the following:

 

 

 

After you sign up for your account, you should visit the PBworks webinars page (think "seminars on the web") to learn about how to use PBworks.  I strongly recommend the Your Guide to PBwiki Basics video.

 

 

What Signing Up and Signing In Gives You


Signing up for PBworks gives you an account with which you can login to pbworks.com.  Whether you are logged in or not, you are able to read from public sites (such as this one).  After logging in (use the login page), you will be able to write to (i.e., edit) the following sites: your own sites (see the section below, "Making Your Own Site", for how to make your own PBwiki sites), sites to which you have been granted writer privileges, and sites which allow all signed in users to write to.  After you login you will be able to read the following sites: your own sites and sites to which you have been granted read access (or above, that is, write

 

    In order to get write access to a site which does not allow all logged in users to edit, you must request access from the site owner.  For example, if you wanted to edit my site, you would have to ask me to add your email address to the list of writers for my site.  This is the most important concept regarding permissions: read and write permissions are set by email address.  You can request access (indeed, you may have already been granted access) to a certain wiki by simply supplying your email address to its owner.  After you create your account with that same email address that has been granted access to said site, you will already be able to access it.

 

    PBworks works under a single sign-on paradigm: you sign in to PBworks once, and you automatically have your appropriate privalidges to all of the wikis that PBworks hosts (like this one).

 

 

Making Your Own Site


 There is a short video tutorial on creating your own wiki.  Note: signing up for a PBworks account is not the same as making a wiki: a PBworks account lets you login to PBworks and edit other peoples' wikis; a PBwiki is an actual site, like this one, a site that you can own and administer.  In order to sign up for a free wiki site (a site that you can create and edit), visit the basic wiki signup page, which should look similar to the following:

 

 

 

What makes a thing a wiki?


After discussing wikis with many people, a recurring reaction has shown that I haven't done a good job of differentiating between a wiki and other types of websites such as static webpages (i.e., uploaded HTML files), blogs, and WordPress sites.  If you haven't worked with a wiki before, as has become clear to me, the difference is not at all obvious.  Wikis differ from static webpages in that they are editable in the browser.  This means that there is an "edit" button somewhere on the page that lets you change the content of the page.  Wikis differ from blogs and Wordpress sites in that you can edit a webpage with a wiki, whereas with a blog or a Wordpress site you can only edit page elements, page elements being posts and comments on a blog site and Wordpress sites.

 

The front page of this site is fully editable to me; I can click "edit" and add, rearrange, and delete whatever I want from it.  In contrast, a site like this blog has its front page automatically generated.  It can be updated by adding a new post, but not, for example, by rearranging posts.

 

A wiki is not inherently superior to a blog: each has its own distinct advantages.  A blog is a web log--a chronological list of posts.  A wiki doesn't necessarily follow a chronological order, and achieving chronological order is more difficult with a wiki since there is no mechanism that automatically recreates the front page when a change is made.  I think that many blogs should have been wikis, so in the next section I will describe when to use a wiki instead of a blog.

 

When to use a wiki instead of a blog


While blogs are easy to start and add to, they are not great for certain content types.  Consider switching from a blog to a wiki (or starting a wiki instead of a blog) if your blog's content has some of the following characteristsics:

 

  • The content is relavent across time.
    • If your posts do not steadily decrease in relevance, you shouldn't have older posts decreasing in accessibility, since in a blog, new posts go "on top" of older posts, thereby burying them (with the exception of the "about the author" section). 
  • Content is often relevant in isolation.
    • If you frequently send links of old isolated posts to people, imagine how much work it would be for those people to dig through your "stack" of posts to find that post if they didn't have your help.
  • Content can be broken down into distinct sections and is more easily digested when in sections rather than in a chronological list.
  • Content is edited by multiple people. 
  • The content differs greatly between subject areas.
  • The content gets edited frequently.
    • Wikis offer powerful editors with features like auto-save (ever had your browser crash and lose your half-finished blog post?) and versioning (every time you save, your old version is archived, not overwritten).

 

In summary, if you have a site that fits the profile of a newspaper, use a blog.  If your focus is on creating something like specialized encyclopedia, a wiki will be far more useful.

 

Further Reading


 


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