Monopowiki: The Free Paid Wiki?

I know. I know. It’s just another paid wiki trying to make a quick buck online. That was my initial reaction to Monopowiki too, because the fundamental business model is much the same: People pay a set amount of money to own the content on a wiki page. There is one very significant difference, however, and that’s what this review is going to explore.

What is Monopowiki?

Unlike other paid wiki sites, Monopowiki allows people to contribute without having to buy a page. The rationale is that this would encourage more active participation from the online community and, more importantly, it would encourage interlinking among pages. This latter element has been largely missing from other paid wiki sites and it’s the thing that makes wikis so powerful and popular.

But if you can edit the pages — including the ability to add advertising and affiliate links — without having to dish out any cash, what motivation would you have to buy a page?

When you purchase a page, you gain complete control over that page. That’s where the “monopoly” part of the Monopowiki name comes from. For example, the make money online page has apparently been purchased by someone, because it is locked from editing. With other paid wikis, you buy a page for 10, 20, 30 years at a time. With Monopowiki, the $25 fee only provides you with a monopoly over a single page for one year.

Only pages that have not yet been purchased can be edited by anyone.

Design and User Interface

The layout of Monopowiki is virtually identical to the countless other paid wiki sites on the net. The aesthetics are not a selling point whatsoever, because every page looks just like every page on every other paid wiki site. Here’s the page for blog, for instance. Yeah, it’s pretty boring.

At the time this review was written, the page for “blog” was still open. This means that anyone can edit it… until someone coughs up the $25 to grab the “blog” monopoly. The page editing interface is straightforward and looks identical to the editing interface on every other paid wiki. You get buttons for bold, italic, hyperlinks, images, and so on.

Before you are able to edit any page, however, you will need to sign up for a free account. Getting an account only takes five seconds. Both an e-mail address and a real name are optional, so all you need to provide is a username and password.

As you can probably imagine, this ease of registration opens the door for spammers and mischief makers. The engine will track your IP, but it wouldn’t take much for someone to viciously deface one of the free pages. They say that they will be instituting editorial controls in the future, but they’re keeping pretty lax to encourage the creation of “a significant index of articles quickly.”

Just Another Paid Wiki

As much as Monopowiki tries to convince us otherwise, it’s really not all that different from all the other paid wikis on the net. They hoped to marry all the best features of a paid wiki with a free one, but by having a paid element at all takes away from the integrity of the information found within. It also doesn’t help that Monopowiki looks like every other paid wiki too.

The Monopowiki $10,000 Giveaway

If you want to own a page on Monopowiki but don’t want to fork over the $25 to buy a page, then you might want to check out their massive $10,000 giveaway. Monopowiki is giving away 400 pages for one year.

All you have to do is blog about Monopowiki before April 24th and submit the link through this form. You can also check that page for more details. Winners will be announced on or around May 2… I guess this is in case there are more than 400 entries.

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