How do I create my own Wikipedia?

December 25, 2011 11:07 AM

I'm volunteering at the Whistler Museum, it's just a little municipal museum, and our archives haven't been digitized yet. If it was possible to turn them into a Wikipedia-style database. Example inside.

Example:

I'm doing an article about the logging camp/ghost town of Parkhurst and I was hoping it would read something like this.

"Parkhurst was a lumber mill and community on Green Lake(link to article on Green Lake) set-up and run by Ross Barr(link to article on Ross Barr)."

Is there a program that could let me write that, either for a website or just for a private database?

It would also be nice to be able to scan documents and tag them to their relevant subjects (and link to them in citations) as well.

posted by Pseudology to computers & internet (7 answers total)

It's more than you're asking for, but Omeka is a popular free content management system designed for museums, archives, etc. You can host it yourself, but you might like to try the free hosted version before going to the trouble.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 11:35 AM on December 25, 2011 [5 favorites]

MediaWiki - the software that drives Wikipedia - is freely available.
posted by nicwolff at 11:56 AM on December 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

It sounds like what you want is covered by MediaWiki software. You may need to consult with someone about hosting it if you don't already have a website and, more importantly, someone who manages your website competently.

With MediaWiki you can easily link to various internal and external resources as you're describing, and you can also upload files for use directly on pages.

A quick glance seems to indicate that MediaWiki doesn't have tagging, but uploading documents and referencing them directly in the relevant articles is probably a more effective approach.
posted by odinsdream at 12:11 PM on December 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

MediaWiki has categories, which are basically tags.
posted by wayland at 12:35 PM on December 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Whatever you do don't forget to BACK IT UP. It would be awful to do all that work and lose it. AmazonS3 may be a good option.
posted by Wretch729 at 1:06 PM on December 25, 2011

We have a website. I'm not sure how well it's managed, though.
posted by Pseudology at 1:30 PM on December 25, 2011

My favorite little version of this is this Brant County wiki. They use Wikia and one of the best resources they have there are cemetery records and links to local histories. They got some grant to do a chunk of it and I bet you could talk to the folks at the local public library for more specifics. Best of luck.
posted by jessamyn at 6:45 PM on December 25, 2011 [2 favorites]