The race is on

In celebration of the Daytona 500, the season opening Nascar race, today I'm featuring the All About Racin' wiki on Wetpaint. It's one online community for Nascar fans. It has 558 members today. When I looked at this site last year, it only had 371 members. The wiki has pages on the history of Nascar, including the champions. It has links to blogs about Nascar racing. It has pages for the current schedule, the teams, and tracks. You'll even find pages on the news about Nascar wives and girlfriends. If you're a fan of Nascar or just curious, drop by this wiki.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics and wikis

In celebration of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, I started my search for wikis devoted to the topic. It's a natural tool for those participating and attending the Olympics. It would be great to share information about navigating through the Olympics venues. It would be interesting to see information posted about the competition results, with feedback from attendees or armchair reporters. I found the Olympic wiki on Wikia. It only has 12 articles though. I also found a MediaWiki version of the Olympics wiki . It is much larger, with over 1880 articles. However, it appears that only one update has been made in the last 30 days. That's obviously a sign of a problem -- with currency of information, especially since the 2008 summer Olympics are underway. I also found a Chinese version but really can't tell much about its currency. I found Olympics 2008 Dashboard, a Zoho Wiki that is tracking the medal standings across countries. As you're glued to the TV watching the Olympics this week, why not visit one of these wiki sites and lend a hand? If you know of another wiki site on the 2008 Olympics, post a comment for us.

ArmchairGM, the ultimate community of sports fans

In honor of the debut of ABC's World Wide of Sports in 1961 on this date, today I've selected the ArmchairGM wiki as my wiki-of-the-day.

ArmchairGM, based on MediaWiki, aims to be the ultimate community of sports fans. It includes articles on sports in many categories, including baseball, basketball, football, soccer, ice hockey, auto racing, golf, cycling, olympic events, combat sports, extreme sports,water sports, horse races, and many more! Writers of articles within this sports encyclopedia can embed flash videos (such as YouTube video clips). Unlike some encyclopedias, fans on ArmchairGM may write Opinions describing what they think about different sports-related topics.

Any and all sports fans are welcome to join the ArmchairGM community and contribute. Community members can post to the community blog -- articles are filtered by the community. Articles with enough votes appear front-and-center on ArmchairGM and hit the RSS feed. ArmchairGM lets fans rate "virtually anything in the sports world" and also make it easy for its fans to grab the ratings and stick them elsewhere. Fans on ArmchairGM can get recognition through points for virtually every activity on the site. Top fans are honored on an ongoing, monthly, and weekly basis. Fans can advance up levels, starting as Little Leaguers and up to the Legends level.

ArmchairGM has been described as an example of Wiki 2.0, combining the features of open source wiki software with social networking features. Each fan can build a profile and include their own photo galleries. Fans may join networks of other fans of their favorite teams. They can meet new people and add friends. Likewise, it also has a counterpart where you can add a fan to your network of foes. It also has a virtual gift component where little icons can be sent to another fan with a personal message (e.g., tissues for team losses, asterisk for accolades). Fans can also create gifts themselves by uploading images.

ArmchairGM has been quite successful. It was acquired by Wikia for $2 million. In March 2008, the Sports Illustrated site SI.com added to its new SI Vault section the "SI Wiki" which is powered by ArmchairGM. This wiki has obviously been found "worthy enough and rich with information" of being the sports wiki for SI.com.

For those who celebrate the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, visit the ArmchairGM wiki, join the community, and jump right in!

All About Racin' - a community for Nascar fans

Today, in celebration of the 50th running of the Daytona 500, the wiki-of-the-day is All About Racin' on Wetpaint. I was looking for a wiki site for the 2008 Nascar fans. This site has 371 members and about 100 pages. It offers links to Nascar blogs and information on champions and crew chiefs. It has about 40 driver profiles on the site. It even has a page about the gossip on the driver wives and girlfriends. It includes some promising pages for Nascar fans for posting favorite memories and fan photos. It has pages to post favorite Nascar photos and videos of crashes. I'm a little disappointed though with the site. It needs a "fresh coat" for the 2008 season. I don't even see the winner of the 2007 Nextel Cup Series on the site. I don't yet see the 2008 racing schedule and profiles of the newest Nascar racers who are moving from the open-wheel racing leagues. I was hoping to see a great page about today's historic 50th running of the Daytona 500. I was hoping that the Nascar chat would be active during the race, but I was the only one there when I tested it. Because some pages have been recently updated and there are several active threads, I believe that the community is still alive, but it just does not seem to be thriving on this site yet for the 2008 season. This site was once a very active site with a growing community but appears to need a little help. If you're a Nascar fan, drop by the wiki and lend it a hand.

Image credit: SportsTraveler