{"id":303,"date":"2009-08-27T13:17:12","date_gmt":"2009-08-27T20:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/new\/?p=303"},"modified":"2014-10-26T15:34:36","modified_gmt":"2014-10-26T15:34:36","slug":"evaluating-wikis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating Wikis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This post originally appeared on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idealware.org\/blog\/2009\/08\/evaluating-wikis.html\">Idealware Blog<\/a> in August of 2009.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m following up on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idealware.org\/blog\/2009\/08\/word-or-wiki.html\">my post<\/a>\u00a0suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web.\u00a0 Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We can all thank Wikipedia for bringing the excellent <strong>crowd-sourced knowledgebase<\/strong>\u00a0functionality to broad attention.\u00a0 Closer to home we can see great use of this at the <strong>We Are Media<\/strong>\u00a0Wiki, where NTEN and friends share best practices around social media and nonprofits.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Collaborative authoring<\/strong>\u00a0is another natural use, illustrated beautifully by the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.flossmanuals.net\/booksprints\">Floss Manuals<\/a>\u00a0project.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Project Management and Development<\/strong>\u00a0are regularly handled by Wikis, such as the <a href=\"http:\/\/fedoraproject.org\/wiki\/Fedora_Project_Wiki\">Fedora Project<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Wikis make great <strong>directories for other media<\/strong>, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\">Project Gutenburg<\/a>&#8216;s catalogue of free E-Books.<\/li>\n<li>A growing trend is use of a Wiki as a <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.idealware.org\/articles\/nonprofit_intranets.php\">company Intranet<\/a>.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Almost any popular Wiki software will support the basic functionality of providing user-editable web pages with some formatting capability and a method (such as &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/CamelCase\">CamelCase<\/a>&#8220;) to signify text that should be a link.\u00a0 But Wikis have been exploding with additional functionality that ramps up their suitability for all sorts of tasks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Floss Manuals team wrote extensions for the Open Source\u00a0<a href=\"%20http:\/\/twiki.org\/\">TWiki<\/a>\u00a0platform that track who is working on which section of a book and send out updates.<\/li>\n<li>TWiki, along with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlassian.com\/software\/confluence\/\">Confluence<\/a>, <a href=\"%20http:\/\/www.socialtext.com\/\">SocialText<\/a>\u00a0and other platforms, include (either natively or via an optional plugin) tabular data &#8212; spreadsheet like pages for tracking lists and numeric information. This can really beef up the value of a Wiki as an Intranet or Project Management application.<\/li>\n<li>TWiki and others include built-in form generators, allowing you to better track information and interact with Wiki users.<\/li>\n<li>And, of course, the more advanced Wikis are building in social networking features.\u00a0 Most Wikis support RSS, allowing you to subscribe to page revisions. But newer platforms are adding status updates and Twitter-like functionality.<\/li>\n<li>Before choosing a Wiki platform, ask yourself some key questions:<\/li>\n<li>Do you need granular security? Advanced Wikis have full-blown user and group-based security and authentication features, much like a standard CMS.<\/li>\n<li>Should the data be stored in a database? It might be useful or even critical for integration with other systems.<\/li>\n<li>Does it belong on a local server, or in the cloud? There are plenty of great hosted Wikis, like <a href=\"http:\/\/pbworks.com\/\">PBWorks<\/a>\u00a0(formerly PBWiki) and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wikispaces.com\/\">WikiSpaces<\/a>, in addition to all of the Wikis that you can download and install on your own Server.\u00a0 There are even personal Wikis like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tiddlywiki.com\/\">TiddlyWiki<\/a>\u00a0and <a href=\"http:\/\/zulupad.gersic.com\/\">ZuluPad<\/a>.\u00a0 I use a Wiki on my Android phone called <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/apps-for-android\/downloads\/list?can=1&amp;q=wikinotes&amp;colspec=Filename+Summary+Uploaded+Size+DownloadCount\">WikiNotes<\/a>\u00a0for my note-keeping.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Are you already using a Wiki?\u00a0 You might be. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;ct=res&amp;cd=1&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F&amp;ei=2xCCSq2vHYr0sgPHlM1k&amp;usg=AFQjCNHj75Au5kt8svXmuNkhBD_DjnPhNQ&amp;sig2=RdUisOxaYA3mU8tlkpdsJw\">Google Docs<\/a>, with it&#8217;s revision history feature, may look more like a Word processor, but it&#8217;s a Wiki at heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m following up on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idealware.org\/blog\/2009\/08\/word-or-wiki.html\">my post<\/a> suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web.  Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of use cases for Wikis: <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,82],"tags":[168,112,104,160,109,156,16,280,279],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nptech","category-tech","tag-cloud","tag-collaboration","tag-data","tag-idealware-blog","tag-open-source","tag-project-management","tag-software","tag-twiki","tag-wikis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1680,"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/1680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}