Previous article

APCUG Web Site

APCUG Reports
April-June 2007

 Next article

Index for this issue		 Default font size
Large font size
Very Large

Wikia and Wikipedia
by Gabe Goldberg, APCUG Advisor

An APCUG Regional Advisor recently heard from a user group leader that important informational/reference Web sites are shockingly uninformed about user groups.

http://computing.wikia.com/wiki/Computer_ groups lists exactly two computer groups: one New Jersey user group and APCUG. Hardly any info is given for either organization, though there are links to the groups' real sites. That there's NO entry for "user group" seems surprising. A longer -- but hardly complete -- list of user group entries appears on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_users%27_groups.

Note that Wikipedia is the better-known user-written/edited encyclopedia, while Wikia is "an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia."

As Wikis become more widely used for research and reference, it's worth the effort to list and describe our user groups in both these forums so that potential members, news media, industry organizations, and hardware/software vendors have one more way of reaching us.