As part of my extracurricular activities, I play Irish fiddle. I suggested on Irtrad-L, a music mailing list, that somebody set up a wiki devoted to listing Irish traditional music sessions. (Nobody is maintaining a complete, definitive list these days, and I thought a wiki would be the perfect solution.) I gave Wikipedia as an example of a wiki so people could understand what wikis are all about.
Well, wouldn't you know it but somebody decides to start the list *on Wikipedia*. At first I said (on Irtrad-L) that this was a bad idea, for a variety of reasons--that the wiki should be located somewhere else. Then I thought again: hey, we can always *copy* the information that gets started on Wikipedia to wherever the information will eventually live. So why not let people get *started*, working on Wikipedia?
THEN the thought occurs to me that the net result of this will be a few more cheerfully addicted Wikipedians--particularly if there is indeed a successful Irish session wiki started up, they will learn the wiki system and remember that Wikipedia is what got them into it originally. Warm fuzzies!
It occurs to me now that this is actually probably a very good way to get people into Wikipedia who might otherwise not know or care at all about it. We all have hobbies and academic interests that, in various ways, might be very well-served by the collaborative treatment that wikis allow. So that's my thought--we could start encouraging the creation of wikis about our interests, and offer to host an initial page about it, and then encourage people to take the wiki info elsewhere.
(Unless it's actually encyclopedic info--in which case, encourage them to keep it on Wikipedia. :-) )
Someone's already done this, too, with AmbientCalculiOnline. That actually brings Wikipedia quite a few hits.
Larry
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org