This is the entry in the knowledgebase about Philwiki. For a quick guide about the uses of Philwiki, see Philwiki:About.
Philwiki is a free, user-edited knowledgebase about topics related to Philmont Scout Ranch. It is a wiki, meaning that it utilizes the collected knowledge of the thousands of people who are interested in Philmont to produce a resource for users of the ranch.
History[]
Philwiki is an outgrowth of Wikipedia Wikiproject: Philmont Scout Ranch. In January 2006, Neil Flanagan approached the leaders of that project to develop a new wiki, which was named in the tradition of all things derived from Waite Phillips, PhilWiki. It was first registered on Wikicities on February 10th, 2006, with the first edits occurring shortly thereafter. Later, to avoid needless hassle, the name changed from PhilWiki to Philwiki
Future[]
Philwiki is expected to emerge from Alpha testing with the completion of all of the formatting and policy articles.
At that point it will be opened to a much wider audience in Beta stage, letting the articles increase to a level where people can get a solid understanding of Philmont. At that point, sometime before the opening of Philmont, Philwiki will be opened to the whole target community, and left to grow.
There are no plans to publish the contents of Philwiki.
Organization[]
Philwiki is run by consensus approaching the article most agreeable to everyone. There is no official leader, however sone users have sysop powers, which allow them to perform certain functions, with a goal of maintaining order on the wiki.
Hosting[]
Because Philwiki is largely a hobby, it is hosted for free on Wikicities, an online colllection of wikis owned by a sister corporation to the MediaWiki Foundation, which owns Wikipedia.In turn for free services, Wikicities offers advertisement space on the right side of the screen. Philwiki is not involved in the selection of advertisements.
Philwiki uses MediaWiki software, which is provided for free by Wikia, the corporation that owns Wikicities. It is not the only software for writing wikis, howevr it is one of the most popular, and is licensed for free under the GNU General Free License.