Apparently a type of "free wiki hosting" is offered by http://wikicities.com/. It appears to be a project of Wikia, Inc. I am currently trying to decide whether to "establish" a pubwan wiki (or a mirror or ForkOfPubwan wiki) there.
I imagine the maintenance of a wiki under such circumstances might
be more than a 2-3 times monthly user of the web such as myself
might be able to handle. Then again, it might not be.
Since I fancy myself someone wanting eventually to become some kind of
ServerSideNetizen, I suppose I owe it to myself to at least try.
I'll start copying files from http://geocities.com/n8chz/PubwanWiki to
21 Feb 2006
As of this writing, Wikia has gotten back to me on my request for a Wikicity. It seems I have been appointed "bureaucrat" of an existing Wikicity (but one which is a DeadWiki) called DataMining (http://datamining.wikicities.com/). As soon as possible (hopefully this coming weekend) I intend to upload a few files of the present ReadOnlyWiki to the data mining wikicity, specifically those I feel to be apropos (on topic) to the subject of data mining per se. I feel justified, for example, in claiming that MaxhiSchema and SwarSchema, are relevant to the subject of data mining, in or out of the context of PubWan. I also plan to add the following PubwanWiki pages to the data mining Wikicity:
Two other existing wikicities have attracted my attention, and at least one of them ("SCA") is appears quite active...They are...
I am considering adding some pubwan wiki content to one or both of these wikicities. I consider the following pubwan wiki pages to be relevant to general economics:
The Sustainable Community Action wikicity deals with numerous subjects that are very dear to my heart, and more to the point, central to my motives in "inventing" pubwan. Here is a tentative list of pubwan wiki pages for possible inclusion in SCA:
One obvious feature of this list of lists is the overlap, which could be seen as redundancy, and therefore bad etiquette, on grounds similar to those for the proscriptions on "crossposting" back during the Golden Age of Usenet. On the other hand, a multi-user ReadWriteWiki is not a newsgroup. Crossposting to several wikis is literally a forking process, and crossposting pubwan content in this way would actually constitute a partial ForkOfPubwan. Each fork has at least a potential life of its own, to devolop differentially, hopefully along lines apropos to its assigned home.
Another difficulty exists. Most of the listed pages contain references to pubwan, including links to PubWan. In the interest of avoiding a faux pas of the shameless plug type, I should probably edit out references to pubwan, at least in an initial foray into the Wikicities. This illustrates the essential difficulty with my relationship with Wikicities as it now stands. My original hope was to find a means by which to host PubwanWiki as a ReadWrite wiki. The parameters for creating new wikicities are quite specific. The official name of a proposed wikicity must be a "real word." "Pubwan," being a neologism, and one with no apparent "following" at that, would obviously not qualify. Since "phrases" consisting of English words in the conventional sense already existed as wikicity names (datamining being one of them, of course) I proposed naming "pubwan wiki" as "opendatamining," which was the most in-a-nutshell compact standard-vocabulary pat description of what PubwanIs that I could come up with on the "spur of the moment." Needless to say, this suggestion caused another wikicities policy to come in play, namely the understandable resistance to creating redundant wikicities. So the folks in charge at Wikia figured why add an "open data mining" wikicity to a wikimegalopolis (wikileague?) already containing a "data mining" wikicity? They named yours truly (LorraineLee) bureaucrat-in-charge of the data mining wikicity (heretofore a DeadWiki). This is reasonable. But it also leaves us without a wiki whose subject matter is that of pubwan.
The vestigial content of the wikicity to which I have been handed the keys consisted (apparently) of a single page (Main Page) with a short list of external links on the subject of data mining. I haven't yet downloaded or read the targets of those links, but it is first on my "to do" list re. datamining.wikicity. My general impression is that the main purpose for which the wiki was created was to contain information of professional interest to professional data miners, and links to more such information. I have decided that my bureaucratic mission shall be to keep it that way. I am a strong believer in keeping fora "on topic." The datamining.wikicity subject area would most definitely be of interest to a pubwan movement. On the other hand, pubwan itself, as I have conceptualized it, would seem a bit more "multidisciplinary" than data mining per se. Clearly I have myself to blame for describing pubwan as "open data mining," when it is (ok, would be) clearly that and more.
There still may be a possibility of getting a wikicity approved specifically as a home for a ReadWrite fork of PubwanWiki. One possibility is that the bureaucrats at Wikia might be persuaded to make an exception to the policy that a wikicity name must be a "word," hence http://pubwan.wikicities.com/ Another possibility is that someone, perhaps me if i get a round tuit, can come up with a neat and brief encapsulation of what PubwanIs without using neologisms. And of course there may be sources of FreeAsInBeer wiki hosting other than Wikicities.