David Gomez's List: Wiki

• • This site gives a good explanation on waht a wiki is and how it can be used to coordinate

• • What better site to explain what a wiki is than Wikipedia
• WIK-ee
• a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor
• created collaboratively by multiple users
• "Wiki" (pronounced [ˈwiti] or [ˈviti]) is a Hawaiian word meaning "fast" or "quick".
• WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki
• • A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
   
  • Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
   
  • A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

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• “A wiki is the simplest online database that could possibly work.” – Ward
• You don’t need to know HTML, nor FTP, nor anything else
• If you are storing and searching mostly text, then a wiki is ideal. New pages are easily created, and linking documents to each other is no problem. The barrier-to-entry is low.
• If knowledge exists in the form of text, it can be stored in a wiki
• If there are more good visitors than bad visitors, then there will be more people fixing vandalism than there are people committing vandalism

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• first wiki software was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham
• In the corporate environment, wikis are best implemented behind a firewall for a wholly internal user base.
• Wikis are structurally capable of handling conversation, but it is not their forte; instead, wikis excel at collaboration

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• Choosing Wiki Software

  I purposely saved this discussion until now, because there are so many different pieces of software available. Here are some of the programs I’ve tried:
• • Wiki Wiki Web (very nice): the original wiki, this one’s plain and simple. WikiWikiWeb is written in Perl and requires no special database features on your Web host. One great feature of this wiki is the ability to autogenerate maps of the interlinked connections with surrounding pages. You can get WikiWikiWeb from the Running Your Own Wiki FAQ and the WikiBase page.
  • UseMod (simple, excellent): a very simple-to-install Wiki — the entire program is just a single Perl script. While it may seem like overkill to throw an entire Web application into a single script, UseMod is very compact, yet extremely powerful. The Meatball Wiki uses UseMod. Configurations are made through a convenient configuration file. UseMod has many features, including an RSS feed, but it manages to stay simple and easy to use. UseMod contains as many of the concepts of pure hypertext as can be implemented simply on the Web, including the handy ability to include bits of wiki content from other pages, a technique called Transclusion.
  • TWiki (many features but somewhat confusing): the most complex wiki I’ve set up. Twiki is great because it has so many features, but at the same time, the amazing number of features also makes it confusing. If you have a lot of time, Twiki is immensely rewarding; if you don’t, you will likely get lost. Twiki is often used by companies and workgroups because it has permissions systems, categorizing features, and even progress bars on TODO lists. Twiki is written in Perl as well; you can download it from Twiki’s release page.
  • Moin Moin (excellent, if you have Python): a simple to set up, powerful Wiki, if your Web host has Python support. MoinMoin also has user management support. The MoinMoin Wiki has more information on installing MoinMoin on the Install Documentation page.
  • PHP Wiki (nice, if you have a database server, but complex): If you want a PHP Wiki, then PHP Wiki may be just what you want. It requires a SQL-based relational database server like MySQL or PostgreSQL to run. It has many features, including user authentication. Like TWiki, PHP Wiki has many features and can seem a bit complicated if you just want a simple wiki. Unlike most wikis, PHP Wiki has template support. Templates are hard to create and require a good understanding of PHP object oriented programming.
  • PHP Wiki Processor (what can I say? I use it!): Why not use a Wiki in the role of a regular content management system? I decided to try it out, and am very pleased with the result. PHP Wiki Processor keeps track of my pages and links at my site. Since it’s my personal site, I want to remain the sole creator — I can’t have anyone change my Resume, for example. So I set up PHP Wiki Processor to generate a set of static PHP pages from all my wiki pages. I can still edit my page online through a secure connection, but I decide who gets to change content on the site. When I load the site, I see an administrative wiki interface. Everyone else sees just a Website, which is how I want it. PHP Wiki Processor has simple, easy-to-use template support, and I was able to transfer my previous site header and footer easily. My knowledge of PHP did help, since I tend to tweak things endlessly. A thorough knowledge of PHP, however, is not necessary to use PHP Wiki Processor effectively.

• • This website gives the history of the popular wiki wikipedia