Wikitosh debuts; new ‘wiki’ designed specifically for Mac community

Wikitosh.com is a Wiki that has been specifically designed to support the Mac Community and in general it deals with all things related to Apple and Macintosh. For those of you not familiar with Wiki’s, it is essentially a website where anybody visiting the site can edit, add content and create new pages at will. One of the best known examples of a wiki and one of the sources for inspiration for Wikitosh.com is Wikipedia.org.

Since the content of a Wiki is entirely user contributed, there may of course occasionally be errors, but Wiki’s tend to be self correcting as later readers can correct or clarify previous entries.

Visit and contribute to Wikitosh here: http://wikitosh.com/

18 Comments

  1. Wiki’s aren’t necessarily a good thing. It’s reality by consensus and has nothing to do with verifiable facts, yet it’s presented as “The Truth(tm)”.

    How is “reality by consensus” worse than reality by an individual or a committee? In the latter, you are trusting that this one person has got it right. In a community, you can have many people verify a fact.

    A well run Wiki is a very good thing.

  2. The intial Wiki page had promise. One click and this gawdy page of messy looking serif typefaces pops up. I like the clean look of sans-serif. But what the heck, it’s free, and I’m just glad it’s around. Good job!

  3. Ashami: Because that individual or committee earned their right to be where they are. A Wiki is just an enormous collection of self-selected anonymous schmucks.

    The idea that “Wiki’s tend to be self correcting as later readers can correct or clarify previous entries” is horsecrap. What makes those later readers any more knowledgable than the original contributor? The implication is that, the more readers you get, the more accurate you get, which is wrong. People get more stupid in large numbers, not more smart.

  4. Ashami-

    Who says it’s group vs. individual? A regular encyclopedia isn’t written by one person. It’s still a large group of people, but in their case they are intelligent, in many instances experts, and thoroughly research everything that gets included. Certainly that’s bound to be more accurate and useful than a group of nobodies telling the world what they think they know. That’s not to say wikis are useless or stupid or whatever, and they have their place. But you can’t make a convincing argument that they aren’t a notch (or more, really) below professionals.

  5. People were quoting Wikipedia as a “news source” regarding the Schiavo case, so I went and looked at it. It was the biggest collection of mis-information, fantasy, supposition, rumor, and downright fraud I’ve ever seen, all presented as solid fact. Non-politically correct information that was posted lasted only a few minutes at most before being expunged. Because we take a vote and agree that the world is flat does not make it so, and it may do others irreparable harm.

  6. A recent Wired had an article on Wikipedia. It was an eye-opening article for me. It’s not longer an authoritative site as far as I’m concerend. It probably contains a good amount of accurate information, but the context of how it’s created makes me think of it more being like like sausage than an accurate source of information that can be relied on.

    It’s name, implying some sort of encyclopedic function, is at best misleading.

    But for Mac users and fans, this should be a very useful site.

  7. This first line of the Macintosh page is enough to make me leave and never come back:

    “Macintosh Computers made by the AppleComputerCompany? are the best consumer computers made in the world today.”

    Yeah, that’s some solid, unbiased factual info about Macs. And the second sentence isn’t even a sentence.

    I think Wikipedia is interesting as a social/intellectual experiment, and I’ve contributed to it myself. However there is one major flaw: the only way to be sure the information is accurate is to already be knowledgeable about the topic. That sort of defeats the purpose of an encyclopedia.

    BTW, there’s already a Mac wiki called WikiMac.

  8. Thanks for all the feedback and a special thanks to MDN for reporting on the site.

    So far the focus has been more on functionality than on form and I am afraid that for the time being that should continue to be our focus. However, we will be taking all the comments on fonts etc. to heart and hopefully in the future we will be able to re-skin the Wiki section and make it a bit more aesthetically pleasing.

    In the meantime, thanks to everyone who has added content so far and will in future. We will continue in our efforts to make the site better so it will be a valuable asset to the Mac Community.

    Jack Arends
    Webmaster and Chief WikiAdministrator
    Wikitosh.com

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