Usually, I stick to the PHP / HTML / XML aspects of the web, as I tinker around with my blog. Recently, however, I've been thinking quite a bit about wikis. This is most likely because the group mind of the web seems to be fixated upon wikis and podcasts of late, as the two hot technologies to gab about. However, although I'm liking iTunes' new podcasting support, I'm not the biggest podcast fan, because I read faster and with more focus than I listen.
On the other hand, I see a lot of untapped usefulness in wikis. I recently polled the readers over at TUAW to see what they thought were the best wikis out there for the Mac, but my interest isn't in running it exclusively as a Mac platform. I really want a powerful community-based wiki for a mixed Mac, Windows, UNIX, and Linux population.
I started searching around. I looked at a few resources, like the Social Software Weblog, and then I started visiting several different wikis that I use regularly and scrolled down to the bottom of their pages to discover what wiki package made them tick. Here's a list of a few of them that I've been looking at so far. Please feel free to contribute your thoughts and impressions to this list in the comments and to correct any mistakes I've made in my early assessment of these packages:
- MediaWiki—Wikipedia is undeniably the best known wiki out there. I'm starting to hear Wikipedia mentioned by regular users, just like Google suddenly emerged in the normal user jargon a few years ago, and Wikipedia is often discussed among the Academics with whom I work. Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki, which looks to be the most robust wiki package out there. It has a rather impressive feature list, but while it's a very well-documented project, it's also a bit daunting. I'm already test-flying this one, and while running the basics of the wiki are relatively easy, there are lots of features, customization options, and different administrative options that I haven't even begun to touch. There's a wiki guide to writing pages with wiki formatting in MediaWiki, which is helpful, but I'm anticipating a rather steep learning curve for supervising, deploying and maintaining a MediaWiki based wiki in an Academic setting. Fun!
- PHPWiki—As a Mac blogger, I keep my eye on interesting Mac-oriented weblogs, and The Tao of Mac has been on my radar for quite some time, both because it has good content and because it is part blog and part wiki. According to the credits page, the Tao of Mac wiki is a highly-customized variant of PhpWiki. PHP is familiar ground for me, so I immediately think that the learning curve will be less than with MediaWiki, and this is a package I need to spend some time with. I also like that it would appear to be a highly scalable package, as it's being used for a single person website by Tao of Mac and in more collaborative settings by others.
- Wikka / Twiki—one of my good friends, Jay Savage, recently launched EngaTiki, which aims to "be a massive public annotated bibliography in Literature and the Humanities." I talked to Jay and he said he was using Wikka for EngaTiki, and was pleased with it, but that he also really liked Twiki, which I immediately like for its bidibidibidi shout-out to a bygone TV show. I haven't played with either of these packages, but I trust Jay's advice and intend to give them both a thorough test in the near future.
So, what am I missing? Is there a better wiki that I am leaving overlooked? Should I be considering more options? Can you recommend any other wiki packages or documentation for these wiki packages? If this blog post were a wiki, you'd be able to amend and correct this list, but since it's not, feel free to collaborate with your input in the comments.
What other wikis or wiki-related resources do you recommend?
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Comments (9)
Read More Entries by C.K. Sample III.
What are your latest thoughts?
Hi C.K., we're looking at using wikis for supporting education at the college level. Just wondering what your latest favorites were.
Will you ever write a follow-up to your article?
There is a commercial one ..
Atlassian Confluence (//atlassian.com/software/confluence/) is a powerful tool using a very simple source format and with good design and functionality.
It is commercial, but they offer special licenses for open source projects and personal pages.
Go with tikiwiki
MoinMoin and TWiki are both awkward in my opinion.
Neither seems to scale very cleanly.
TikiWiki is one you should check out. It has a very clean look and it's very robust.
Well, since I live inside PHPWiki...
...And have tried most of the others (I am the guy at the Tao), here's my Eur 0.02:
That said, I've been slowly hacking away at a Python-based Wiki of my own, all the while looking at other Wikis. Go over to the Tao and check out the "OtherWikis" and "NewWikiMigration" pages for more information.
python anybody?
moinmoin?
Instiki
My personal favorite is Instiki http://www.instiki.org which is a Rails (Ruby) app...it hasn't been brought up to the latest version of Rails yet but is one of the slickest (but I've not seen a great test of scalability) in my opinion.
Look For WYSIWYG Input
The company I work for, Ephox, has had a massively successful wiki rollout replacing it's intranet and it's become a pretty powerful knowledge capture and collaboration tool as well (though wikis have a lot of short comings for collaboration).
The most important thing we did was make it dead simple for users to contribute content. Wikis were intended to do that and achieved it for geeks, but failed miserably for average users because they require learning a new markup language.
We integrated EditLive! for Java, a WYSIWYG HTML editor to get a very simple, intuitive, familiar interface for users to work with when inputting content. As a result we not only have a lot more content in our wiki but it also tends to be neater and more readable than most wikis.
All that's pretty easy for us since we happen to make EditLive! for Java so it's free and we have really detailed knowledge of how to integrate it into the wiki (it's actually really simple with most wikis that support plain HTML input). There are however plenty of opensource in-browser WYSIWYG editors out there that may suffice for your needs. The key thing is to ensure that you pick a wiki that can use plain HTML to store it's pages, otherwise you have to write your own WYSIWYG editor for that particular wiki syntax which is far too much effort.
Plain HTML comes with a bunch of security problems (got to filter out those JavaScript tags etc) but for internal use is so much easier and allows you to change wikis or publish to different systems at the drop of a hat. Think of a wiki's file syntax as a form of proprietary lock-in then consider whether or not you're happy with that lock-in.
JSPWiki
The company I work for uses http://www.jspwiki.org/ internally for our wiki.
DokuWiki.
Recently I've noticed a number of well done sites using DokuWiki.
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki
I've yet to try it out personally though.