CollegeWikis.com is a site full of wikis for specific colleges. The site, which is built off of the MediaWiki framework, allows users to ask questions to a specific group (students in a certain dorm, class year, course, etc) of students at their school. When a question is asked, it’s e-mailed out through the wiki to other registered students in the group. If someone in the group knows the answer, they can reply to the question directly from their e-mail client. When the question is replied to, the answer is automatically posted to the wiki. This makes the answer easy to find for future users with the same question.
If the answer changes in the future, anyone can go into the wiki and correct it. If you already know everything about your college, you can skip the e-mail lists entirely and post your knowledge directly to the site.
To become a registered CollegeWikis user, students must have a valid .edu e-mail address from their school. Some of the CollegeWikis have active user bases around them (5% of Harvard undergrads have registered; 10% of Stanford undergrads; 14% of Tufts undergrads), while others don’t. For those that do, the students using them have turned their wikis into great resources. On the other hand, some other schools’ wikis look almost untouched. It will be interesting to see if they remain that way or if it’s simply a sign of the site being young.
