as of february 2011 type private founded august 1 2006 headquarters toru poland area served worldwide founder s micha fr ckowiak key people micha fr ckowiak ceo and founder former coo pieter hintjens former ceo industry internet services wiki hosting social networking employees 4 slogan s publishing network free open collaboration software website www.wikidot.com www.wikidot.org alexa rank 3 894 july 2016 update 1 type of site online website builder advertising google adsense registration free required to create a wiki users over 1200000 available in afrikaans arabic australian english brazilian portuguese chinese simplified chinese traditional czech danish dutch english esperanto finnish french german hungarian italian japanese korean norwegian polish portuguese romanian russian serbian spanish swedish thai turkish ukrainian vietnamese launched august 1 2006 current status active wikidot inc. is a polish wiki hosting corporation which owns operates and supports the community of wiki based web projects at wikidot.com a social networking service and wiki hosting service or wiki farm developed in toru poland . wikidot.com was launched on august 1 2006 and in 2009 it was the world s third largest wiki farm 2 with 570 000 users running 150 000 sites with 5.6 million pages of user created content as of september 24 2010 . wikidot.com grows by about 900 1 000 new users each day . wikidot.com roughly doubled in size during 2011 . 3 following their migration to amazon web services in september 2012 wikidot became a finalist and first prize winner in the aws global start up challenge of 2012 under the category of consumer applications . 4 wikidot inc. released wikidot.org in january 2008 the official foss version of the wikidot.com software project with an ajax based interface . 5 it is meant as a stable and free software for a single wiki install or a wiki farm on a gnu linux computer . the foss wikidot.org software is licensed under the gnu affero general public license . there are debian ubuntu . deb packages for the free wikidot.org software which are considered experimental as of october 2011 and may break existing wikidot installations . 6 wikidot inc. is incorporated in delaware usa division of corporations file no. 4326793 . contents 1 company history 2 software and features 2.1 features 2.2 advantages 2.3 criticisms 3 wikidot community 4 wikidot interface in other languages 5 references 6 external links company history edit wikidot.com is owned and operated by wikidot inc. incorporated in delaware usa in 2007 by wikidot.com founder micha fr ckowiak and a group of private investors . wikdot.com was developed in poland and was published as open source in january 2008 . wikidot inc. derives revenue from opt in advertising and services including support licenses . the company s operational offices are located in toru poland . 2 the officers of the company were pieter hintjens ceo and micha fr ckowiak who is also a general manager of polish operating office . pieter hintjens is ceo of imatix corporation past president of the ffii and has been active in the free and open source software field since 1991 . micha fr ckowiak is a former astrophysicist certified software developer and the architect and lead developer of the wikidot.com project since 2006 . 2 on february 26 2010 pieter left the ceo position in wikidot to continue his work in imatix 7 wikidot has been consistently placed in the top 10 000 web sites by alexa since the beginning of 2008 and is currently ranked in the top 5 000 . 8 from march 2008 wikidot.com began offering pro account features to beta testers and on december 17 2008 wikidot.com rolled out pro accounts to all users . 9 starting in january 2011 wikidot.com began offering a multilingual model on an experimental wiki basis by inviting the world wide community to translate most used commands help text and other literals from english to every wished language . after a week some languages like german french and serbian were translated 100 % by the community and spanish chinese russian finnish italian are following now and growing in their completeness . this is now on a site basis and planned for the future is user based translation so that whoever wants to build a wiki in a special language can do so even in klingon . software and features edit originally conceived as a pure wiki the wikidot engine today has become more than just a web application framework . it provides page templating so that the appearance of pages can be changed in one place . it provides page processing the listpages module so that users can create summaries graphs lists and reports . it provides data forms so that pages can be edited as structured data and not as a wiki at all . some of the applications that wikidot users have recently built are calendars chatrooms issue trackers blogs and even mediawiki emulations . wikidot.com supports unlimited pages and users . 10 users can apply ssl encryption map their wiki to an existing domain other than wikidot.com customize privacy settings assign roles and interact in wiki specific forums . a wiki can easily be enriched with content from flickr youtube and other sites by embedding features . 11 wikidot.com uses a custom wiki engine that has been released as free software under the terms of the affero general public license . 12 the software is written in php and is notable for doing extensive caching to reduce database accesses . the wikidot software runs wikidot.com . wikidot.org is one of a few foss wikifarm software see comparison of wiki farms and a number of competing wikifarm services use it such as wikicomplete.info . 13 on the 30th august 2012 wikidot announced plans began migration from their traditional datacenter operated by softlayer technologies inc. to amazon.com s ec2 . this was completed on the 4th september 2012 . 14 since then load speeds have increased dramatically . 15 static files like css stylesheets user avatars and javascript files are delivered through amazon cloudfront and dns services is provided by amazon route 53 . 16 since the 12th september wikidot also stores user file uploads directly on amazon s s3 storage system . 17 regular database backups are also made and stored on s3 to ensure data durability . 18 wikidot uses an open source modified text wiki software engine . each site gets a subdomain on . wikidot.com like mywiki.wikidot.com . site owners can also map custom domains 10 like mywiki.com if previously registered by the wiki owner . there is also a list of subdomains registered by wikidot for users which provides an alternate wiki url without requiring the user to buy a domain name beforehand . 19 one can optionally allow wikidot to display ads on their wiki and get 80 % of revenue . 10 20 other possibilities are rss import export 10 private rss feeds for users notifications and watched items rss for page changes and forum customizable themes which also can be styled by adjusting cascading style sheets css 10 advanced forum for each site custom page hierarchies powerful search engine advanced page full section append edit locking blocking users and ip addresses . users can send each other personal messages . wikidot uses an ajax user interface . there are no limits on site size . there are embedable widgets such as youtube google video flickr meebo etc. until december 17 2008 wikidot offered only a free service and unlike other free wiki hosts it had no advertising or premium service . 21 on december 17 2008 wikidot introduced premium accounts . 9 there are three types of premium accounts pro lite pro and pro . the difference is in price and quantity of pro features offered . 22 23 both free and pro accounts can have open closed or private wikis . open and closed wikis are visible to everyone on the internet with open wikis available for any registered wikidot member to join and closed wikis having restricted membership rules . private wikis are only visible to members and wikidot users added to the site s extra access list . the service supports advanced editing tag clouds a flexible permission system custom themes and the ability to generate revenue through google adsense 20 which are not obligatory for free sites . 10 wikidot also provides an application programming interface api for third party developers to interact and manipulate pages through the xml rpc protocol . all paid users are automatically provided with two api keys a read only and a read write key however free users can also request for them via a request page on their developers wiki . external developers can then use these keys to read or write data through methods from 5 namespaces categories files tags pages and users . 24 features edit each site gets its own subdomain on wikidot.com flexible permission system suitable for both public and private wikis customizable themes to create a unique look and feel 20 numerous widgets available to embed in the wiki 20 generate revenue through different advertising programs including google adsense 20 25 extensive documentation and an active community support forum advantages edit wikidot has a clean user interface that is easy to learn and use . for experienced wiki users wikidot is powerful and user friendly . private wikis are a much appreciated feature more than 40 % of created sites are private . 26 criticisms edit wikidot has been criticised for being too complex for beginners . it does not have a wysiwyg editor and the wiki syntax is incompatible with other wiki syntaxes . storage space for free accounts is limited and free sites still show text advertisements in some cases . its permissions model is too simple for advanced users . development of the product goes slowly and a long list of user feature requests is pending . 27 also the admin owner has to decide after the creation of the wiki to which language it will switch the site . this model works fine on a site basis but not yet on a user basis . wikidot community edit wikidot expert users have worked together to build large parts of the service . initially this was a community site 28 for supporting new users and discussing solutions a snippets site 29 for reusable pieces of code and a multilingual handbook . 30 at present there are german english spanish italian french turkish japanese dutch polish chinese indonesian romanian and portuguese handbooks . today the wikidot user community also makes themes 31 packages 32 dashboards roadmaps site templates 33 and reusable applications . in october 2009 wikidot launched a competition for a new user designed home page . 34 in many respects wikidot.com can be considered an open source service as these reusable building blocks are licensed under the creative commons attribution sharealike 3.0 license . new features can be requested using the wishlist . 35 each user has karma which is an indicator of that user s activity engagement and experience . the highest karma level indicates that a user is experienced with the wikidot syntax and is active in the community and is considered to be a wikidot guru . 36 wikidot interface in other languages edit from the very beginning wikidot interface was available in english and in polish . at the beginning of 2011 wikidot started experimental project translate wikidot . 37 the project consists in translating wikidot interface to other languages to make the service more approachable by non english users and it is done by wikidot users on a volunteer basis . 38 the first languages with the finished translation were serbian 39 french and german 40 and the translators got one year free pro accounts as a reward for their efforts . 41 there are also italian finnish dutch chinese japanese korean etc. the project is still ongoing so from time to time as more