The authors would like to thank Ward Cunningham for inventing wikis and for his generosity in sharing the concept with the world. Ward helped us write the book by providing his thoughts in several interviews and writing a wonderful foreword. What the world needs now is not only more wikis, but more Wards as well.

This book was written using the Communication by Design methodology of Evolved Media Network in which a group of people, using a wiki of course, creates this book using a division of labor. Dan Woods and Peter Thoeny played the role of editor/analysts who designed the book, performed the research, and invented and captured the content. The writing team included Dan Woods, Peter Thoeny, Noah Robischon, Deb Cameron, Deb Gabriel, John Biggs, and Erin Schulte. We offer our sincere thanks to them all.

This book would never have happened without the support and For Dummies wisdom of Katie Feltman, Nicole Sholly, Teresa Artman (all of Wiley), and Keith Underdahl, who was brought in to help us. We authors bow and tip our hats to you.

Many people in the wiki world were interviewed for this book or contributed content in various ways, including interviews and e-mail. We thank them for their enthusiasm and positive attitude. This generous group of people includes: Jimmy Donal Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Adam Frey and James Beyers of WikiSpaces; Joe Kraus of Google/JotSpot; Ramit Sethi of PBwiki; Ken Tyler of seedwiki; Matt Wiseley of EditMe; Sam Obio of BluWiki; Steven Marder of Swicki; and several others who chose not to be named.

Many, many wikis are described in this book, but many great wikis are not. Given that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of wikis thrive on the Web, covering them all would be impossible. We attempted to capture a representative sample, but no doubt we have failed. For example, because of the deadline for this book, we weren’t able to include screenshots from Google’s JotSpot, which will no doubt change the world of wikis when it officially launches as part of Google’s application toolset. We tried to include wikis in each of the broad categories we defined: content-focused, process-focused, community, and ease-of-use wikis. We are certain, though, that more categories will emerge, and perhaps the ones that we have defined will morph into new ones. If you know about good wikis that deserve attention or have comments on the book, we do want to keep the conversation that resulted in this book going in any way we can. Peter Thoeny would love to hear from you at www.structuredwikis.com and Twiki.net and would be overjoyed to help you build a wiki of your own. Dan Woods will be continuing research and reporting on wikis at www.evolvedtechnologist.com. Please visit us in either place to share your thoughts.