[Web4lib] Drupal and wikis

[Chris Gray]

John Fereira wrote:
> At 10:51 AM 6/11/2007, Chris Gray wrote:
>> Wikis were originally designed to allow people to edit or add to a 
>> Web site using simple plain text directly through their browser. It 
>> provides some automatic full text indexing and fairly automatic 
>> managing of links. Access is through following links or full text 
>> search. The organization is basically hyper-textual or web-like and 
>> not hierarchical with a navigation scheme. The Wiki look is basic 
>> html without many of the visual features we now associate with the 
>> Web. Forms and tables are not supported. Although images can usually 
>> be included the emphasis is on text.
>
> Not all wikis are the same.  I've been using the Atlassian Confluence 
> project  for a couple of years and it does support a hierarchical 
> navigation scheme and tables.  Table support is rudimentary out of the 
> box but there are third party plugins that support tables much 
> better.   I've been actively involved as a developer on open source 
> projects for five years or so and Confluence has become the wiki of 
> choice for virtually every project I've encountered recently.  
> Although it is a commercial product they have a free license for open 
> source projects as well as a free license for their issue tracking 
> system (Jira).   If you go to issues.apache.org you'll see that the 
> Apache Software Foundation is using Jira.  Codehaus.org is using 
> confluence to document all of the open source projects under their 
> umbrella.   I wouldn't use a wiki to develop an institutional web 
> presence but they've certainly evolved from a system which allows text 
> entry through a browser to create web based content.
You say that as if not having tables or hierarchical navigation is a bad 
thing.

The paragraph quoted is not meant to describe all things that now bear 
the label of Wiki, but to describe the basic original notion of the 
software that is now buried under many layers of enhancements designed 
to add to Wikis functions they were not originally meant to have.  I was 
addressing the confusion that is common now about the nature of a CMS 
and of a Wiki because much software called Wikis have become more and 
more like CMSs.

As always, the criteria for choosing a tool are complex and these days 
the tools and the features they offer are hard to compare.  I have a 
tendency to favor the simplest tool that will do the job.  Life is 
easier that way.  I wouldn't complain about a basic Wiki for its lack of 
features; in fact, I would be more likely to praise it.  I still admire 
the original Wiki (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki).

But then I prefer Notepad to Word.

Chris