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Archive for the ‘Background to the Wiki’ Category

wiki-software and wiki-hosting

20 Aug

Back to the Wiki theme for this post, after a couple of diversions.

There are a massive amount of options for creating a Wiki, the two most important being the software and the hosting. If you have a practical background in MySQL or PHP then you can do this stuff yourself, but for the rest of there are wiki hosts and wiki software.

Wiki Software

Wiki-hosting sites will offer some kind of software built in. So the question of which host to choose is bound up with the question of which software you want; obviously you need to know which of those your priority is and act accordingly. For the purposes of the Best Practice Wiki it is, of course, a bit of both – I want software that is friendly enough to use so people aren’t put off from contributing, but I also want decent hosting which won’t suddenly disappear, or bombard users with adverts.

Anyone who has ever contributed to a Wiki will know how important the software is. We’re used to having both simple and complicated instructions acted upon by word-processing programmes etc, with the minimum of fuss. It is unbelievably annoying if you are trying to edit or contribute to a Wiki and the software is anything less than intuitive.

An important feature for many users is WYSIWYG – which means What You See Is What You Get editing (we’re encouraged to pronounce this ‘wiziwig’ but I just can’t bring myself to do so). As you can guess, this basically means anything where the end result looks exactly the same or at least very similar to how it looks when you are editing it. Absolutely loads of wiki-software offers WYSIWYG editing, so you’d need a really good reason to go with another type where pages looked significantly different when being edited to when they’re live.

I’ve used MediaWiki for another Wiki in the past, and found it fantastic to use – better than any other software I’ve encountered. It is clean, simple and intuitive, and I’ve set up a test Wiki as a precursor to the Best Practice Wiki which has convinced me that it’s easy to set access controls and so on. Anyone who has ever edited Wikipedia will be familiar with it as it is what the great Wiki behemoth itself uses (although Wikipedia has been in the news recently as apparently less and less casual users are seeing their edits endure, as a kind of editing aristocracy is taking over and rather going against the ‘everyone can contribute’ ethos on which it is founded). MediaWiki is the daddy, and it is the software I’d like to use for the Best Practice Wiki. It is also free, and Open Source - you can pay hundreds of pounds or dollars a month to use some Wiki-creation software.

You can view a comparison of Wiki Software on Wikipedia for more information, although be aware that, due to its inherent Wiki-ish nature, it is open to a certain amount of abuse from firms basically advertising their own software by editing the entries.

Wiki Hosting

As I’ve made my decision with the software as the main driver, I now have to find a wiki-host that supports MediaWiki. I could try and get some server space at the University of Leeds (where I work) but after talking it over with our head of e-Strategy, Bo Middleton, we’ve decided against this. She’s not keen because the only Wiki’s hosted at Leeds are very limited-user and aimed at just in-house use, and I’m not keen because I don’t want the Best Practice Wiki to be affiliated with any one institution. It isn’t a ‘Leeds’ Wiki, and everyone should be encouraged to contribute to it.

I’ve heard great things about WetPaint, which I know offers WYSIWYG editing and other HEIs have used it successfully for Wikis, but as it doesn’t offer MediaWiki I’ve ruled it out. Similarly, Peanut Butter Wiki (better known as PBWorks) is extremely highly regarded as a host, and offers excellent Wiki software too. But it also offers both free and paid-for hosting, and I’m always wary of that – things which may start off free could potentially move to the paid-for packages later if they need to boost revenue once they’ve hooked you in. And most importantly to me, it doesn’t offer MediaWiki. In order for this Wiki to work, people have to be comfortable creating and editing content, and for me the best way to ensure this is to use the most fool-proof and instinctive software.

There are paid for hosts, advertising-supported hosts, and just completely free hosts. An example of a completely free host is Wiki Spot, which offer free wikis for non-profit ventures and communities with no advertising at all. This seems ideal, but their example Wiki’s look unattractive and pretty dated, so I’m wary of the software. The options left are to pay, which I’m unwilling to do, or put up with advertising, which is a necessary compromise. However after an exhaustive comparisons of all the different hosting companies, I’ve found one where the adverts are minimal and won’t disrupt use. I’ve opted for is wikkii.com. It is free, it offer MediaWiki software, and their revenues come from very minimal advertising. On the test version I set up, small adverts sometimes appear down the right hand side of the page, and it’s very unobtrusive. It also has unlimited disc-space and unlimited bandwidth, which could prove absolutely crucial if the Best Practice Wiki takes off. The URL of the Best Practice Wiki would be whatever we choose to call it, then .wikkii.com. So for example, http://digi.wikkii.com.

[There is a comparison of Wiki Farms available via Wikipedia, but it doesn't look very reliable and is heavily flagged as having 'disputed partiality' etc. A better place to go is wikibooks.org - see this comparison guide for free and paid-for Wiki hosting.]

What do you think?

This blog serves as a sort of guide for anyone thinking of doing a similar thing (I’m doing the homework so you don’t have to…) but also a sounding board – do you agree with the choices I’ve made above? Do you have experience with other hosting sites you think could do a better job, or do you feel I should do everything possible to avoid any kind of advertising?

I’d love to hear what you think, so leave me a comment and we can get some discussion going. Nothing is set in stone yet, so you may even change my mind!

- thewikiman

EDIT (15/09/09): Since writing this post, I’ve discovered WikiMatrix which is an absolutely brilliant resource; a thoroughly comprehensive comparison of all wiki options. If you’re planning on starting a Wiki, go there first to find the right option for you…

 

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…the story so far…

23 Jul

So here is where we are with the Wiki, and the reasons for creating it.

I’m doing my dissertation at the moment, for my Library & Information Management MSc. The subject is the impact of the CLA’s Scanning Licence on the academic library so I’ve been doing a lot of research in this area, including collaborating with Jane Secker of LSE and June Hedges on a huge survey of the digitisation practices of HEIs. What this research has led me to conclude is that there is no one source of information, guidance, or Best Practice, for digitisation under this licence in HE.

People can go to LIS-Copyseek for copyright advice, JISC Digital Media for training on the logistics of scanning, LIS-Hug for general discussion – but there’s an obvious lack of a central resource. Not only that, but many HEIs would really benefit from such a resource; there is huge disparity in the practices and approaches all the different HEIs have, but we all share similar difficulties and issues. Particularly when your digitisation service or project is starting out, you can learn more from an hour’s lunch at a conference just asking people from other institutions what they actually do than from a month sat alone at your desk trying to work things out by yourself…

The best medium to provide Best Practice info seems to be a Wiki. It’s easily accessible, simple to use (if you pick the right software), allows contributions from all practitioners, and is updateable too. (Plenty of stuff in the archives of LIS-Copyseek may have been true when it was written, but may well now have been superseded by changes in the legislation. With a Wiki, the original poster can update what they have said to reflect the current state of affairs.)

I initially floated the idea at the Scanning Workshop and Discussion Meeting, hosted by Derby and Leeds MET in June this year (by Linda Swanson and Rachel Thornton specifically). It was the kind of event where people asked exactly the kind of nagging, niggling queries which the proposed Wiki could address. When I outlined the Wiki idea, the response was overwhelmingly positive – everyone present thought it would be a very useful resource (and around a quarter of them even volunteered to contribute to it!).

I said I’d look into it further, and raise it at the HERON User-Group meeting at the University of Westminster in July. This was a larger event, so if people were as enthusiastic there as they were in Leeds it would definitely be worth taking forward. At the end of a presentation with Jane about the collaborative survey, I proposed the Wiki – having explained it all, I asked for a show of hands as to who would find it a useful resource. As far as I could see, 48 of the 49 people present raised their hands (and that’s a conservative estimate…).

Clearly, the need is there and the digitisation community are keen on the idea of such a resource. From then on I’ve decided I will create the Wiki, and this blog is part of that process – I’ll be asking for feedback on certain ideas in the comments section, and this is a way of publicising the Wiki site when it eventually goes live (which will happen perhaps as early as August / September – famous last words!).

So that is the state of play for now – I’m currently investigating platforms and software, and I’ll report back on all that stuff soon.

- thewikiman

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