Welcome to the Jewcy Wikis!

What's this Jewcy wiki business all about?

It's a match made in heaven. On the one hand we've got a new Jew-ish website that wants to foster a robust, disorienting polylogue within our community, a sloppy process of collaborative creation whereby Jewcy people hash out the answer to that Jewciest of questions: What matters now?

And on the other hand we've got a new collaborative technology that's turning the web upside down. It's called a "wiki", and the concept behind it is as simple as it is radical. Unlike a traditional webpage, which can only be modified or edited by someone with access to the server on which the page is hosted, a wiki webpage can be edited by anyone at all. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, says that the wiki is the purest expression of what the web was always supposed to be. Interactive. Collaborative. Dynamic. Jewcy wiki pages are written and edited by anyone who wants to participate.

Jew-ish people should get all this intuitively. After all, the Talmud was one giant exercise in collaborative brainstorming. You think if the Amora'im, the big brains behind the Talmud, were around today, they'd be writing down their thoughts with quill pens and parchment? Don't count on it. They'd be banging out the Talmud on a wiki.

How do I edit a wiki?

It's simple. In fact, thanks to the great work of Jewcy's web development team, editing the Jewcy wikis is pretty much the same as editing in a bare-bones word-processing program.

If you're logged in to your Jewcy user account, you'll see an "edit" tab in the upper left corner of this and any other Jewcy wiki webpage. Just hit the edit tab, and you'll be able to edit the page you're looking at. You'll also be shown a simple formatting palette with which you can gussy up your text, add images or tables, et cetera.

When you're done making changes, hit the "submit" button toward the bottom of the page. You're done. You and all other visitors will now see the webpage as you've left it. You can even make changes to this page, if the spirit moves you.

That's really all there is to it. But beware! Anything you add to a wiki webpage is likely to be brutally modified by other editors. The "wisdom of crowds" can be downright vicious.

Want to practice editing a little before you take a crack at any of the real Jewcy wiki projects? Go to the Jewcy Wiki Sandbox, where you can try editing a wiki page by messing up the Hamas charter. The text is there for you to to butcher up, to make mistakes on. That's because there are no mistakes in the Jewcy Wiki Sandbox. And if you don't mess with the page, Jewcy will end up hosting the Hamas Charter forever.

What wiki projects can I work on?

We've got a few to get us started.

* We're rewriting the Amidah, Judaism's most important prayer. Help us at the Amidah Improvement Campaign Wiki.

* Jewcy's coming out with a list of twelve "Jewcy radicals", people who pursue their own radical social or political vision and who have suffered major personal costs as a consequence of that pursuit. Nominate radicals at the Jewcy Radicals Wiki.

* Over at the Jews Who Rock Wiki we've got entries on every notable Jewish musician out there...at least, all the ones we know of. Read it. And if you know of someone who isn't on the list but should be, add them!