Open Source Wikis

I am not interested in hosted wikis (eg wikispaces, pbwiki, etc). I am interested in people's experiences as end users and administrators using open source wikis that can run on linux servers.

I have worked with TikiWiki, MediaWiki, and a couple different wiki modules running within Moodle.

TikiWiki has an extensive administrative back end, but I find the software a bit bloated for my purposes as it tries to do all kinds of things beyond wiki, for example, chat room discussion forum and more. It is really more of a content management system. That's great if you are looking for that kind of solution.

MediaWiki, the Wikipedia engine, is nice and lean, yet configurable. Most administration must be done by editing php text files as there is not much of an administrative interface. The MediaWiki site provides all kinds of snippets of code to copy and paste making it easier than one might imagine. The user interface is pretty straight forward, but I'd like to see easier formatting and image uploading (there may be a plugin for that).

The Wiki modules that I have used within Moodle have been somewhat limited in general, although the interface for the end user is a bit simpler.

Any other experiences out there? I have seen the Wikipedia's wiki matrix (an excellent resource), but I am interested in any experiences you may have had--particularly working with students in an educational environment.

Again, I am not interested in hosted wikis (eg wikispaces, pbwiki, etc). That has already been discussed.

Thanks,

Steve

Tags: open-source, wikis

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Permalink Reply by Miguel Guhlin on April 9, 2008 at 10:16am

Steve,my preference is for PmWiki.org. I like it better than MySQL based wikis which are hackable and have to be updated constantly.

Miguel

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on April 10, 2008 at 2:43pm

I'll take a look at it. The endless security updates with php/mysql sites gets tiresome for sure. On the other hand, it is such a part of my life already with most software I do use.

I presume access can be controlled in such a way that it is appropriate for classroom use--right?

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Permalink Reply by Gary on April 9, 2008 at 10:19pm

Hi Steve,
Although you mentioned it I have used a mediawiki install for the last little while. Kids picked up the markup language quickly although I wish it had a better wysiwyg interface. Found a site http://umwdtlt.org/newmedia/ that helped me with theme integration of media wiki and my wordpress blog using the misty theme. I agree that there is a lot of information out there that allows for customization. Making it so only my students could login was a feature I needed and that was fairly easy to hack. I must admit with my hacking ability I have ended up with the white page more that once but all in all it has gone well. Made a few dumb pilot errors the funniest of which was not being specific enough about what groups named their pages so I had a few different groups accessing the same page called scripts as they were working on a video script. Kids could not figure out why other groups were editing their scripts. The process you have with simultaneous edits was at first a bit confusing but we worked that out with a few examples. At first, however, I would have liked an easy page lock function but I did not research this as the kids became comfortable with the way mediawiki handled this.

I agree with your assessment of Tikiwiki I found the back end almost overwhelming as there was too much there to deal with.

Gary

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on April 10, 2008 at 2:40pm

While I wish it had more of a wysiwyg interface, I understand why it doesn't. I just think that a little help getting started through a wysiwyg editor would help the kids get moving.

I have to laugh about your hacking attempts, as my experience has been much the same. It is a great learning experience though, and having gone through the error messages, site collapses, and blank pages has made me more fearless (as Long as I have a good text editor with plenty of undos!

Another thing I do like about MediaWiki, is that it gives students experience in working with the Wikipedia interface and markup.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Kennedy on April 10, 2008 at 7:56am

I am partial to DokuWiki a simple flat-files based wiki. Its fast, has a nice administration panel, low system requirements. Supports page history which is important to us in a school environment. Easy to set up users, groups, multi-levels of access. You can upload most standard file-types, images, pdf, etc.

It is easy to set up multiple wikis. You simply create another install of dokuwiki, set it up and you're ready to go. I have tried WikkaWiki, PmWiki, MediaWiki, and a couple of others. I like the speed and simplicity of Dokiwiki. It as plugins, skins, and additional features as well.

That said, it is intended for smaller organizations which suits us fine.

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Permalink Reply by Gary on April 10, 2008 at 10:08am

Tom,
Like the plugins I saw will try it out. The word easy has never been part of the whole mediawiki install and maintenance. Did not see if it offered page locks but will look more.
Thanks, gary

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Permalink Reply by Miguel Guhlin on April 10, 2008 at 10:38am

Dokuwiki is a good choice, and I'm sorry I didn't mention it earlier. I did write about it here:
http://tinyurl.com/59supv
and first look was here:
http://tinyurl.com/6b87o8

In the end, I dropped it because it was slow and cumbersome, while Pmwiki was much faster. Pmwiki also worked in more places than Dokuwiki.

Take care,
Miguel