On Sat, 2004-30-10 at 16:09 -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
That brings up another thing. What's the big problem if we have a nearly empty Wikipedia for a while? How much space does that take up? As long as we aren't having heaps of requests to such a degree that we need a screening process so that we don't end up with 300 new Wikipedias by the end of the year, what's the huge problem?
The security of the computer running a wiki depends on having a healthy and attentive community actively involved in the wiki. If there is no community, the wiki software is a security risk. At the very least, it is an eyesore -- and a poor advertisement for this project.
If you're interested in running a wiki apart from Wikimedia, you can find lots of free Web hosting services that you can run it at. Here's a list of PHP-enabled free Web hosting services:
http://www.0php.com/free_PHP_hosting.php
Here's Yahoo!'s directory of free Web hosting services, some of which might also be able to run wiki software:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Communication...
If you decide to run a wiki on your own, you can either run MediaWiki, the great software that makes all the Wikimedia sites run:
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/
...or you can try and use another Wiki engine. The canonical list is here:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines
There are a bunch that don't need MySQL behind them, which can make things easier if you're looking for free hosting.
Good luck!
~ESP