Wikis and Archaeology

Although you might not have heard of them, a wiki is a kind of website that anybody can add to or edit--actually it's a database, but there's no need to get technical here. You've certainly heard of the Wikipedia project, that huge encyclopedia that is growing by leaps and bounds everyday as a huge horde of volunteers add and develop existing pages. But the Wikipedia is not by a long shot the only use of wiki these days. Here's a few I've found.

• Mediating Archaeology, Stanford
• Archaeologists of the Greek Past, Stanford
• Introduction to Islamic Archaeology, Joukowsky Institute at Brown
• CDLI Wiki, which is on Mesopotamia and at UCLA
• History of Archaeology, an experimental wiki begun by Kambiz Kamrani on AnthroNet

What most of these projects do is combine the facility of a wiki format with a logon, so that some control over content (or content-providers, anyway) can be sustained. It's an interesting way to allow collaboration--when, say, a class uses a wiki to develop a project on a particular subject--and a good sign for the future of collaborative research.