The use of community-based wikis is beginning to take off. Two major wiki-based projects are uderway: Wikiversity, which supports an open source approach to academic courseware and SENSEable City, a project from MIT that aims to allow anyone to update city maps with real-time location information.

Wikiversity bills itself as more than a source of educational information. It is an online community where educators can experiment with course materials to learn what works and what doesn't when it comes to online delivery. The community portal supports the efforts of all members of the educational community, including students, teachers, researchers and those involved in educational service.

Wikiversity hosts free educational content, multimedia materials and other resources, which are provided in a number of languages. Like Wikipedia, all members of the community can edit pages, something that Wikipedia and similar efforts have come under fire for in recent weeks.

MIT offers a similar service, through its Open Courseware project. Currently, MIT offers more than 1,000 free courses to anyone, with the understanding that students will not receive a degree of any type from MIT, nor will they have access to MIT faculty members.

MIT is also leading the SENSEable City Project, a wiki-based mapping project that allows anyone to update maps in real time. Data are collected from a variety of sources, including GPS and cell-phone signals, governmental data on weather, municipal data on routes and real-time traffic reports. Map users can perform specific searches and update information on city-wide or area-specific maps.

The Wikimedia Foundation predicts that such use of wikis will be commonplace within a few years.