Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

My colleague John Bratlien recently wrote a summary on wiki comparisons. With his permission, I am posting the comparison result here and hoping it will help those of you who have demands to deploy your own wiki servers. Our IT infrastructure (mainly PHP/MYSQL applications) limits the pool of candidates selected for the comparison:

Overview and Objective:
Arts ISIT requires a fully featured and user friendly wiki solution to support our faculty in their teaching. The wiki interface should be intuitive so that a lay person can use it without more than just a basic introduction. In addition, we want a wiki solution that is low maintenance (easy to install, configure, support and upgrade).

Comparison:
The following matrix is a comparison of some key features offered by well documented, widely deployed, leading open source wikis. The focus is on PHP based wikis with the exception MoinMoin.

Notes:
* via plugin
** some of these wikis have experimental and beta versions of WYSIWYG editors, not production ready

Summary:
Ideally our requirements, WYSIWYG editor, easy inclusion of multimedia and intuitive management of content and users, are supported out of the box. Features that are part of the core are more likely to be robust than features added through plugins, as well plugins require additional work for separate installation and configuration. Of these wikis,
MoinMoin comes closest to meeting our usability requirements and does so primarily using core functionality. The PHP based wikis do not offer a workable WYSIWYG editor, however, of the bunch, TikiWiki offers the best pseudo WYSIWYG editor.
Regardless, lack of a WYSIWYG editor continues to scare off most users and therefore wikis lacking one should be eliminated from contention.

With regard to support and documentation, all of these wikis are adequate as all have highly active user communities and are well supported (as open source projects go).

Other Systems to consider:
There are PHP based wikis with fully featured WYSIWYG editors such as telepark.wiki and Triki-Wiki. However, telepark.wiki is not free; it costs 149 Euros to purchase. Triki-Wiki, on the other hand, is free and looks very promising but it is developed and maintained by only one individual, not a community. In addition, it is not widely adopted which makes it a riskier option as it lacks the support and documentation of a widely adopted wiki.

Using the hotel's business center or a public computer without the IM application and you have no right to install it? Sign in the a web interface and keep chatting with your buddies! Check out MEEBO.com and e-messenger.net, quite interesting web applications.

From the product selection process to the actual launch of this multi-user blog system at the University of Calgary took less than 2 weeks! Amazing work. D'Arcy and his colleagues screened through over a dozen of multi-user blog/cms type of social software and decided to go with Drupal, a well built open source CMS in PHP and mySQL. Here is D'Arcy's reason on choosing Drupal over others:

"Why use this rather than something like Blogger, or Typepad, or something else? The biggest benefit (at least initially) is the ability to create ad-hoc organic groups, where content that is published by group members is displayed on a "group page" - an easy way to collaborate with a research group, a breakout group that's part of a class, or a department."

I have been looking at some of these social software lately for our learningtools web site, and I would have gone for Plone if we have enough Python expertise in our team. It seems that Drupal is not a bad choice either...