Created by the ever-determined James Kanjo, is a new wiki with one focus: allowing people to collaborate on several fictional, never-ending stories.

Originally announced on his blog earlier today, James says that if someone were to begin writing a story on a wiki, but later decided to stop due to a lack of time, "another person can continue the story by writing their own pages". He continues: "Stories can then become collaborative works, and as we know, wikis are perfect for collaborative works."

This sounds exciting, but stories are meant to be written by one or two individuals for a reason. If you have too many editors, you have far too many points of view, and that leads to disagreements about where the storyline is headed. It just doesn't work!

If you don't like the plot, the characters, or the intended ending of a collaborative story, that usually means a dead-end. But, James has something to say about this as well. He goes on to suggest that if you don't like the story, that you should take it in a different direction, "depending on the plots YOU choose along the way."

"This is something that typical wiki engines are not capable of; but as we know, Wikidot is not your typical wiki engine."

So what does this mean?

1. The person/people you are collaborating with write a story
2. You disagree with some portion of it
3. Next you begin writing your own version of the story, adding in the events and the characters that you want to include

This is a problem — the publisher would only want one story. That's what they would have said in the contract, as well. Wikidot is different because there are no publishers. Everything you write gets published to the web, even if it's of a different opinion or focus to the work others have contributed.

The Never-ending stories wiki deals with this perfectly. At any point in the story you are encouraged to take it off on a tangent and to stay as true to the story as you want to be. For things to make sense to the reader, you should keep in mind what has already happened… but the future is yours to shape.

Practice your writing abilities… tell the world your version of the stories found on the wiki… and have fun reading the very unexpected turns that other writers have made even though they started at the same point as you did.