[Web4lib] Choosing a wiki

[Chad F. Boeninger]

I agree with what David says here.  Since Wikipedia is so popular, users 
can quickly pick up how the search feature works, and how things are 
organized by category, etc.  If your site is built with MediaWiki, and 
you use the default skin, your users should be comfortable navigating 
the site for information.  I've use MediaWiki for my wiki 
(http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki)  for over four years. 
The only drawback is hosting it yourself, which requires you to do your 
own updates.  The wiki language of MediaWiki is very easy to learn, and 
the developer community is pretty robust.  If you're concerned about the 
wiki language, you can basically borrow the code from a page you like in 
Wikipedia, copy it to your site, then change the content but keep the 
layout.  That's one of the best ways to learn.  I'd also recommend 
looking at the WikiIndex (http://wikiindex.org).  to find sites you 
like, and then see what software package they are running for the wiki. 

Hope this helps,
Chad

D.H. Mattison wrote:
> Oct 1, 2009
>
> Since your students are more than likely familiar with Wikipedia and
> possibly might even had made contributions, choosing MediaWiki may be your
> best, least-cost solution. Is your wiki being hosted within the UTO
> computing network or is being hosted outside? If the latter then I think
> you'd have to look at how MediaWiki compares with Confluence for security. 
>
> You might want to take a look too at the WikiMatrix for comparison purposes.
> I compared the two and the first thing that struck me is that Confluence may
> not run on a pure LAMP platform because it has different system
> requirements, mainly the server and the programming language. 
>
> Sincerely,
>
> David Mattison
> dmattison at shaw.ca
> http://www.davidmattison.ca
>
>
>
>
>
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>   

-- 
Chad F. Boeninger
Reference & Instruction Technology Coordinator
Business & Economics Subject Specialist
Ohio University Libraries
boeninge at ohio.edu
(740) 597-1932
AIM & Yahoo IM:  cfboeninger
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/businessblog/
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki/