It’s a bit interesting when you look at a site mixing a wiki with a touch of myspace and blogger. It’s most interesting because today it hasn’t been done before especially as well as WetPaint.com. Their site is quite a good bit colorful and more enjoyable to browse than wikipedia is. It’s a difficult concept to take something like wikipedia that to me is somewhat of a staple like the newspaper is to the news industry and mix it with some of the Internet’s Pop Diva style website’s.
As with other wiki’s Wet Paint allows for any of the visitors to paint a little of the sites content themselves, creating their own sections on whatever topic they want or to modify other peoples content. The immediate difference you’ll notice is the lack of the black and white theme from wikipedia for a more colorful and enjoyable green toned theme with colorful images determining the topic categories.
Beyond the standard wealth of Information that wiki’s provide they also have like I said a large social network and blog aspect that makes it different than the other wiki sites out their. Each user that signs up to edit and maintain wiki’s as part of WetPaint also get the ability to update a personal blog and discuss the changes they’ve made a well as anything else. The social network aspect allows for all the editors to have friends that are editors and see the way that their social networks are connected to each other.
But why you may ask the need to mix social aspects and the information aspects into one central website. well realistically because the 2 actually do fit hand in hand together. The informational wiki community is exactly that a community, people with similar likes and dislikes a peer group that likes writing informational content. So it’s pretty obvious that they would also like to talk and communicate perhaps with editors in their own wiki topic fields, or just general editors.
The blogs also even fit in nicely with the wiki editorial community, it allows for the wiki contributors to keep the users up to date on what they’ve been working on in their lives and in relation to the WetPaint contributions a well, especially if their are specific editors that a viewer enjoys reading content from. Not to mention if their are contributors that feel like letting off some steam if by chance someone keeps messing with their content. At places like wikipedia, it’s a bit too newspaper, theirs no area to scream and yell when someone defaces a wiki page, you just fix it and forget it, well with the message board and blog community aspect of WetPaint theirs definitly a place to vent.
Source: WetPaint
