What are wiki farms?

Wiki farms are sites which offer wiki hosting. Some offer free hosting and others offer fee-based hosting. Some require you to use wikitext, a simple text markup language, but many offer a WYSIWYG editor.

• What’s the benefit of creating a wiki on a hosted service? Not having to deal with installing and maintaining complex programs to support the wiki functions. If you're not a programmer or if you don't own your own server, then a wiki farm or wiki hosting service is your best choice. Here's a short video from the Wetpaint team that describes the benefits of its hosted wiki service.

As posted on YouTube by wpseattle

• What’s the danger? There's very little danger. However, here are some things you should know.
  • As with other types of websites, the service providers of a wiki farm may have problems and your wiki be unavailable. For example, one wiki service was down for weeks due to web hosting service provider issues. Check out the wiki service and learn about its hosting and data backup services.
  • Some hosts are operating on small budgets with little corporate funding. If they lose a server, you may be in limbo while things are being corrected and recovered – and hopefully only a short while. It is always wise to save a backup copy of your data. For example, BluWiki once was down and posted a note on its site about a hardware failure experienced and the need for funding in order to fix the problem. Check out the wiki service and learn about the services it provides. It may be fun to be on the cutting edge, but I'm not sure I'd post important information on a server in the basement of some entrepreneur's apartment.
  • Some hosts delete wikis without notice, especially if inactive for some time. So, make sure you save your own backup copy of the data in your wiki and check the terms of service.
  • Some hosts lock you in to their service by using proprietary wiki markup languages or proprietary wiki engines. It is often more difficult to transfer to another hosting service when the wiki is not using an open source wiki engine. On some wikis you have the choice of the wiki syntax to use. This would be another reason to select a wiki service that does not require you to learn and to use some version of wiki syntax.