You can say good-bye to the hassle of removing one member from your wiki at a time. Wikispaces now allows you to administer members on your wiki in bulk! As an educator preparing for the new semester, you can easily remove your previous students from your wiki before adding new students. Or as the organizer of a growing wiki, you can quickly promote a new round of organizers to help you manage your work. You can now take advantage of bulk management when: Removing members from your wiki Promoting or demoting members or organizers on your wiki Approving pending membership requests To use these new features, log in as your wiki’s organizer, go to "Manage Wiki" and then to your "Members" page.

Did you know that tagging your files can make them easier to find and add to your pages? In this post, I’ll show you how to use tags to help organize the hundreds of files on your wiki. What is a tag? First, let’s go over a little vocabulary. Tags are a simple way to categorize and classify pages and files on your wiki. When you assign a tag to something, it’s like putting a label on it. Let’s say I were a teacher who wanted to keep track of all the different homework assignments I upload to my wiki. I might tag each new assignment I upload as "homework." I can then search for this tag and find all the files that I have tagged "homework." Tags allow me to search across my hundreds of pages and files easily. How do I tag a file? To tag files on your wiki: Go to "Manage Wiki" and then the "Files" page. Select the option "Show Tags, History, and Size." The tags for each file will appear under the file name. To tag a file, click the "edit" link under the file name and type your new tag - "homework" or "homework week 2″ or "Jason." Once you are done, click "Save" to save your tags. Note: You can add as many tags as you would like to a file. If Jason uploads his homework assignment to your wiki, you may want to tag the file as both "Jason" and "homework week 2″. You can then find this file when you search for all of Jason’s work or for all of the week 2 assignments. Now that I’ve tagged my files, how do I find them? There are several ways to find files tagged in a particular way. In this post, I’ll focus on two: searching for tags and filtering your files by tags. To search for tagged files, simply type the tag into the Search box in your wiki’s sidebar. You’ll see the tag listed in the search results. Click on it to see all the pages and files with that tag. You can also filter your files by tags to find the one you want. To do this, edit a page and go to the "File" tool in the toolbar. On the right-hand side of the file upload tool, you will see "Filter by Tag" and "Find Tag." You can use these options to narrow down your search to just a few files. Once you find the file you want, click on it to add it to your page. Give it a whirl! Now it’s your turn. Go ahead, tag your files, and see how much easier it is to find your students’ assignments or your marketing case studies out of the hundreds of files on your wiki. We’d love to hear what you think about file tags or any other feature. Feel free to email us with your feedback at help@wikispaces.com.

You asked for ways to delete your old files before the new school year begins or to lock those 50 pages before you invite your colleagues on board, and we listened. Our new bulk management tool makes it even easier to manage your files and pages - without the tedium of administering pages and files one at a time. What bulk management options do I have? As an organizer of your wiki, you can now: Delete your files and pages in bulk Lock and unlock multiple pages at once Bulk approve, remove and promote members on your wiki How does bulk management make my life easier? We are all busy. Bulk management lets you spend less time managing your wiki so you have more time for family, friends, or even uploading those company reports to your wiki. Just a few clicks and you’ve removed all your unwanted pages and documents. To use these bulk administration features, go to your wiki, "Manage Wiki," and then to either your "Pages" or "Files" page. Let us know what you think with an e-mail to help@wikispaces.com.

Deleted your page by accident? Now you don’t need to e-mail us - you can restore the page yourself. With your wiki’s new Recycle Bin, you can easily find and restore recently deleted pages. To restore a deleted page, make sure you are logged in as the organizer of your wiki. Go to your wiki and then "Manage Wiki." Under the "Content" heading on that page, you’ll see the new "Recycle Bin" icon. When you click on it, you will see your recently deleted pages. Select the ones you wish to undelete and click "Restore."

Man. Man! Growing up is fun. Five years ago, two friends talked six adventurous souls into building a scant handful of wikis. And look at us now: over 4 million members with more than a million and a half wikis, and we just keep growing. It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway, because that’s how much we mean it) that we couldn’t have made these five years happen without you. So thank you for being so great, for your endless enthusiasm, and for the way you keep building wikis that make us excited about what we do. To mark the occasion, we’re turning this blog into a celebration. So you can look forward to posts later this week that show how our numbers have changed over the past year, some of the accomplishments we’re most proud of, and highlights of some of those truly fantastic wikis that you guys keep building. Here’s to another five years — and many more!

In keeping with our birthday tradition, let’s take a look at the numbers behind the site. We’d like to start with the big numbers: In the past year, we have almost doubled our total registered users to 4.46 million. And the number of wikis? 1.8 million — again, almost twice last birthday’s number. Wow! And if those numbers aren’t big enough for you, since March of 2009, we’ve had 642 million pageviews and nearly 72 million unique visitors. In the past month alone, we’ve had more than 74 million pageviews and nearly 8.8 million visitors. Honestly, we just can’t get used to numbers like that, they’re so big. Not all that long ago, it was a banner day if we hit 100,000 edits. But now, that’s what we call "Tuesday." We were excited, though, when we hit 144,354 edits in one day on March 2. And between 10 and 11 a.m. on February 23, we had 11,597 edits in a single hour, beating out the previous year’s best by more than 25%. Or, without the editorializing: March 2010 March 2009 All-Time Registered Members 4,468,404 2,244,700 All-Time Wikis 1,804,063 905,127 Pageviews 642,412,469 381,589,973 Unique Visitors 71,808,285 40,079,863 30 Day Pageviews 74,673,090 51,486,418 30 Day Unique Visitors 8,804,730 7,396,158 But we can’t take the credit: It’s because you are working so hard, building wikis that make people excited to participate. So thank you, everyone. We can’t wait to see what the next five years will bring. Pageview and visitor stats are from Google Analytics and are through March 15, 2010. Tell us what you think with an email to help@wikispaces.com.

If you’ll indulge us, we’d like to steal your screen for a minute to boast about the great stuff we’ve done over the past year. It’s been twelve months since our last birthday, and we’ve put in a lot of work to make it easier for you to build the wikis you need and more fun to collaborate in them. Take a look at just a few of our favorite accomplishments: Our Private Label service is better than ever We made all of our premium features available to every new Private Label site, so that organizations of all kinds can have the functionality they need to be successful. Now all new Private Label customers get our most powerful features, including Single Sign-On and our full API. We’re finding more and better ways to integrate with the systems you already have in place for course management, project management, authentication, whatever. We built plugins to let your Wikispaces Private Label site authenticate against Moodle and ISS/Active Directory, and have made it easy for you to set up integration with any authentication system. It’s easier to build and manage your wikis, even across huge organizations, when you build a site-wide template based on an existing wiki. Now you don’t have to build the same infrastructure over and over again — all your pages, files, and permissions are packed up and ready to copy to other wikis on the same Private Label site. We made it simpler to manage your wiki We built a new tagging system that makes it so much easier to keep track of the hundreds of files and pages on your wiki. Now it’s a breeze to view or change tags directly on the wiki page — no matter who posted the original tag. And we made it just as easy to tag your files, so you can find what you’re looking for with no trouble at all. New custom page permissions make it possible — heck, even easy — to decide who can view or edit right down to the page level, not just for the whole wiki. We gave you the power to manage your files, pages and users in bulk. Now you don’t need to go through the headache of deleting all of last year’s pages one…at…a…time. Instead, you can just pick them off the list and click one button — and you’re done. Our interface got prettier and easier We added premade color palettes to the Look and Feel tool so you can set an entire color theme with the click of a button. You can either stop there, or use our color scheme as a shortcut to personalize your wiki your own way. And now the Preview button displays your color changes, too. The editor toolbar is better than ever. We moved the tools you used less often into unobtrusive submenus and used the space we saved to label the Link, File, Widget, and Table buttons. Our new File Picker makes it easier to find the files you’re looking for. Now you can flip through pages of your files or search for files by name. Or you can filter by tag, so it’s easy to track down files in the way that makes sense to you. We added a feature that lets you take any page, or even an entire wiki, and convert it into a great-looking PDF. Now it’s easy to print professionally formatted copies of your wikis, save them for archiving off-line, and share them — even with people who don’t have access to your wiki. …and we still love hearing from you. Let us know what you think with an e-mail to help@wikispaces.com.

In a way, it’s not just us turning five this week. Sure, we set the table, but you guys brought the cake. The way we see it, this is your birthday, too. So we talked to some people who’ve seen us through a few birthdays: Vicki Davis, one of the founders of Flat Classroom, has been with us since 2005, and Dan Beeby, an educational technologist at Columbia University, has been with us since 2007. "The keys to our future as a human race lie in the untapped potential of true, ethical, meaningful collaboration," says Vicki. And that’s what we’ve seen, in these five years: people bridging distances, bringing nation to nation, classroom to classroom, tying plan to execution and the past to the future. As Dan points out, in higher education they’re even breaking down silos between semesters: "It’s easy to carry one semester to the next, just by renaming the wiki. So the original work the students have done isn’t lost forever in a course management system." Without all those barriers, so many things are suddenly possible. The horizon is closer, and it’s broader than ever. And that’s the thing, really. It’s not just that your work keeps us going: it’s that the ways you work challenge and inspire us. A few people who’ve done some truly excellent things in the past year (or more) told us what they’re up to. We bet you’ll think their wikis are as cool as we do. TheScienceClassroom Among other things, Jody Bowie’s high school students are actually writing their own textbook. Their work is visible to the public, so you really should check it out, and let Jody know that he’s managed to bring "new meaning to the idea of teaching students to ‘consider their audience’ when writing:" I see this project as a way for students to begin to create an online portfolio. In fact, I had a student who wanted to know if she "could use the wiki project to show her previous writing work" for a summer workshop in which she was participating. I said, "of course!" Mr. Bruce’s History Two and a half years ago, Larry Bruce decided to give his 9th and 10th grade social studies students a more global perspective on collaboration along with a solid education in U.S. History. With student portfolios, a classroom calendar, and a posted curriculum, he’s done just that: From small-scale partner assignments (Inaugural Addresses) to larger collaborative tasks where students worked with classmates from other class periods asynchronously (The Big Kahuna), our wiki was a place to publish. Simply put, our wiki WORKS for us. As my students mastered introductory elements and uses, I kept reinventing how we (collectively) employed the platform. Genefish Steven Roberts, Assistant Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, wanted to share science. So he gave his students a place to keep their lab notebooks online: We use it for almost all aspects of our research activities including protocols, location of resources, and general communication. One key aspect is that all members maintain an electronic lab notebook using Wikispaces. This allows everyone (including the public) to follow what we are doing in real-time. Garmin Oregon Complicated devices like the Garmin Oregon outdoor handheld GPS device can be confusing. To help, Scott Dresser created a community that acts as a reference space and a forum for Garmin Oregon owners. Integration with a wide range of media types is one thing that I like about Wikispaces; support for different kinds of media, file downloads, and video helps a lot when you are trying to present information to new users. Since I have multiple wikis and a related Wordpress blog, one thing I wanted was an integrated search function using Google custom search. Wikispaces custom templates allowed me to easily integrate a search function that searches results across all of my sites and returns relevant results. Some closing thoughts It’s exciting, this birthday thing. Because, as far as we’ve come, there are always more challenges, and better ways of looking at things — and we’re learning about that through you. At Columbia, Dan tells us, they’re constantly finding new and better ways to work with the wikis on their Private Label site. "It’s an iterative cycle. We assess what the instructor is looking for and make suggestions. We expose the weaknesses or strengths, then make changes the next time." And, whether you’re working in a university, or a school district, or a company or non-profit, or just building a community around the things that you’re passionate about, it’s been exciting for us to watch you do just that. And now we’ll let Vicki drive it home, because she really says it better than we ever could: I wish Wikispaces a heartfelt happy birthday for their fifth year. In the five years with Wikispaces, they continue to respond and grow and help us press forward to the true collaborative editing environment that has become the gold standard of what we do in the Flat Classroom projects. We create and we collaborate and that is also what Wikispaces does. Thank you, Vicki, Dan, Jody, Larry, Steve, and Scott. And thank you, too, to all the rest of you out there, for all the amazing things you’ve done in these last five years. Happy birthday, from all of us to all of you. Let us know what you’re doing with your wiki or Private Label site: help@wikispaces.com.

When working with a new tool, I always appreciate watching someone else use it before I jump in. With this in mind, we’ve created some new Private Label tutorials for all of you. We introduce you to a Wikispaces Private Label site and show you how to set permissions, invite your members on board, and more. Sit back, relax, and imbibe some site administrator knowledge. An Introduction to Your Private Label Site Become familiar with your Private Label site and learn to edit your wikis. Introduction to Site Administration Become familiar with the site administration features on your Private Label site. Setting Site-Wide Permissions Determine who can access or view content on your site by setting site-wide permissions. Customizing Your Site’s Look Change the overall look of your site to create a branded look for your organization. Creating Wikis on Your Site Create wikis for all your classrooms, departments, or projects. Bringing Your Members on Board Invite members to individual wikis or create accounts for your users up front.

Whether you’re new to Wikispaces Private Label, an old hand at running a successful site, or just curious about what a complete wiki environment could do for your organization, we’d like to invite you to our Private Label Webinar at 4 p.m. PDT on April 20. Sarah has prepared a little something for everyone, from a simple introduction to our administrative tools to some great advice on how to organize your site for maximum success. Plus, we’ve invited Aaron O’Shannessy and Lisa Hayman from BRIDGE, a cross-cultural learning project, to show us what they’ve done with their Private Label site. BRIDGE is using Wikispaces Private Label to build a  lasting bond of learning and cultural understanding between schools in Australia and Asia. So their perspective should be very exciting. Once again, that’s April 20, at 4 p.m. PDT. We’d love for you to join us. Let us know you’re coming.