Manual:Deciding whether to use a wiki as your website type

If you're considering creating a website, your first decision, even before 1>Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Deciding which wiki software to use|deciding which wiki software to use, is deciding whether to use a wiki at all. For the most part, it comes down to a decision of whether one believes in the wiki way, which is to make bad changes easy to fix rather than hard to make.

A wiki is useful any time you want to have decentralized collaboration in a central place. This is in contrast to sites such as nytimes.com or britannica.com, which are large central repositories of content that are centrally controlled by editors and webmasters who report to their respective corporate entities; or the blogosphere, which consists of decentralized content production that results in the work being posted to many different sites, each of which is under the authority of, and is the responsibility of, the individual blogger.

In some cases, it may be expedient to have a wiki be one component of one's website, and to have the rest be non-wiki. Even the 1>Special:MyLanguage/Differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and wiki|Wikimedia Foundation uses a non-wiki front page for its portal to the wikis listed at wikimedia.org. Other sites, have the wiki as one tab along a ribbon that includes blogs, online stores, etc. and allow the search bar to include results from the wiki in the search results for the whole site.

Ways in which wikis are similar to other sites

 *  The buck must stop somewhere:  Someone will have to be the ultimate authority on what content is to be allowed to remain on the site.
 *  The site is only as good as the contributors make it:  If there isn't enough interest in adding high-quality content, then the site won't have it.
 *  The site can be run like a regular blog:  It is possible to use either blogging software or wiki software as a content management system by adjusting the settings to limit open collaboration. ( See, e.g., . )