P2PU is investigating the use of a new wiki. We are currently using a hosted proprietary wiki (pbworks.com).
How do we make this decision?
- Who will install and support the wiki?
- Is this something the dev community will take responsibility for, or do we need to budget funds for a contractor to install and provide ongoing support?
- How do we identify the main features / requirements for the P2PU wiki?
- List all features, then prioritize
- Investigate which of the possible wikis best fits with the prioritized features and requirements?
=== Background Discussion ===
SHOULD WE USE A HOSTED OPEN SOURCE WIKI?
One potential solution to the wiki problem, particularly the "who will install and support it' part could be satisfied by utilising a pre-hosted wiki eg Wikia.
Benefits: someone else is responsible for uptime
Q:How much will it cost?
Q: What functionality do we get (maths formula support?)
Q: Can we have the URL set to "wiki.p2pu.org"
Q: Can we tie user control in with P2PU's LDAP setup in the future (one login)?
PBWiki is not open source and if nothing else that's a good reason to choose a new platform for hosting collaborative wiki style content.
Comparison Chart:
http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/DokuWiki+MediaWiki+MoinMoin+Tiki-Wiki-CMS-Groupware+TWiki+XWiki
I have a question re MediaWiki and Data Storage- what does it mean that it does not store text? DELIA
MediaWiki saves its content within a database that is optimised and manages references between pages a little better. Some wikis don't rely on databases and store their content as individual textfiles for each page. Textfiles are human readable (and editable) which is great, but they aren't as efficient or scalable as database content.
http://www.wikimatrix.org/wiki/feature:Text%20Files
http://www.wikimatrix.org/wiki/feature:MySQL
Pippa
YOUR VOTES PLEASE: (seems a little early to vote - PS)
MediaWiki - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki +2
XWiki - http://www.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
TikiWiki - http://info.tiki.org/Get+Tiki#Tiki_Demo:_Try_Before_You_Install
MoinMoin - http://moinmo.in/
DocuWiki - http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki
Wiki Wishlist
- Easy to Edit/ Create New pages
- - easy for people to edit, must have a WYSIWYG style interface
- - no need to learn/understand wiki syntax (ideally "WYSIWYG" - what you see is what you get) (not "ideally" - but absolutely crucial - Philipp)
- Free/open source
- - must be free and open source
- Internationalization / Localization support
- - must support non european character sets and have multi-language support
- right to left text support would be good and gives us a broader audience in the longer term.
- Ability to print nicely
- - must have a good print style sheet that converts to PDFs that look nice (really a must have?)
- Customizable design/ branding
- - ideally it should be brandable to reflect P2PU's identity (I guess all open source wikis are by default, but some are much easier to theme than others)
- Account management
- - accounts should be linked to P2PU accounts and created on P2PU membership (this would be ideal) (this will probably demand some programming anyway, but it could be easier or more difficult)
- - Easy account management (in case integration is not easy)
- Access control
- - page-level and/or account-based permissions (ability to choose who can read, edit) (Is this really a must? No such thing in Wikipedia, it's all done by social norms)
- Social norms are great if you have a sufficiently large community of wiki gardeners. Do we have that? Currently almost all spam is removed by 2 or 3 people. I am not sure we need page level access control, but we can't rely on social norms and gardening to take care of everything. -- PS
- Revision History
- - revision history? (probably but perhaps not crucial?) (i think crucial - but all wikis do that no?) (Absolutely crucial I'd say, it's a core Wiki feature - and one of the reasons why you can choose to be more permissive about access)Must-have, and all wikis have that. Agree, must-have, but all wikis have it - PS.
- Ability to leave comments on the page
- - comments? (IMHO not sure this is necssary, but want to capture opinion) (nice to have)all wiki software that I know have Discussion pages
- Hosting options
- - self-hosted (greater control) or hosted (easier)? (/possibility/ to self-host important) (I think this is such a crucial piece of our infrastructure, holding so much of the data we generate, that we should self host. Also, typically wikis do not require that much resources to host) (I think hosted solutions are better as long as it's easy to migrate away - precisely because the data/content is so important to us. The cost of self-hosting, in terms of worry/time/down-time is almost certainly higher than reasonably priced hosting - PS)
- SPAM
- Needs basic spam control, such as CAPTCHA or similar. See comment about community gardening above. - PS
- Access to volunteer support
- Active development and support community in case we need help.
- Ability to tag pages
- Ability to extend/ embed
- Easy to embed widgets (copy-paste) such as YouTube, calendars, blogrolls.
- Wiki must be able to parse generic html for copy-paste of content from the web. WYSIWYG (like Wikispaces) would be nice, but even "embed html" is doable.
- math formulas ideally LaTex
- Migrate from PBWorks
- Ability to migrate from PBWorks. (Philipp: This should "in theory" be possible for all wikis, but I think it makes sense to investigate how much effort it would be and if there are some wikis that it's easier to migrate to)
- Ability to upload files / media
Use Cases/Discussion (Jessy):
- If we want a wiki as a place for living documentation, such as we use it now for p2pu as a whole, then one of these monolithic wiki solutions probably makes sense. On the other hand, if we primary see ourselves using the wiki for courses, then I think an alternative solution is to plan, over the medium term, to build wiki-like pages into our website's course pages for running courses.
- I would like to see the wiki used for documentation within courses. It would be great if Webcraft participants could slowly build up a list of resources and their own tutorials.(pippa)
- Yes - it's interesting to discuss at what level discussions should take place - we definitively need a general P2PU wiki for community coordination, tech documentation etc. I think it would be great if the wiki was used to host resources for subjects - like copyright, cyberpunk literature etc, and having someone extract useful resources from finished courses and post/link to them on the wiki... SO the cyberpunk wiki could contain resources from a bunch of cyberpunk related couses, as well as external etc. We could also have wikipages for each course of course, this could also be done automatically (each course in p2pu.org automatically embeds the wikipage Courses/coursename for example). They would still be available by going directly to the wiki, but not as easy to find. Similar to what we do for chat etc.
Main Wiki Contenders
MediaWiki
When looking into MediaWiki it is important to understand that as a platform it can be quite a bit different in terms of usability and functionality than the standard install you might see on sites such as Wikipedia. Here are descriptions of various extensions that are worth looking into when considering MediaWiki as a platform.
WYSIWYG Editors:
Supports LaTeX
Wordpress with MediaWiki
Comments:
- MediaWiki /can/ look different from the custom install, but all the things listed above as requirements don't come naturally to MediaWiki. I think it makes sense to start with the requirements and then choose the tool.
XWiki
Several math ed projects use it, for whatever reasons - must be good for STEM? http://www.xwiki.org/
- really good visual editor which lets itself expand by administrator defined macros and the only wiki on earth I know that allows a page to be edited by some in wiki syntax and by others with the visual editor
- flexible permission management
- expandability through velocity (simple), and groovy (elaborate) scripting
- decent PDF generation, also supports Office uploads
- all normal things of a wiki: history, profile, comments, ...
- pluggability of "applications" (e.g. photos, streams management) as well as macros (e.g. social bookmarking)
- active support community (users@xwiki.org, powered by a company that responds really often) as well as open-source license (LGPL)
- can scale well (see Curriki, i2geo.net, ...)
- issue: java based so no cheap hosting easy to find
- advantage: request blabla.myxwiki.org can be hosted for free
(comments of Paul Libbrecht, paul@activemath.org)
- no right to left text support.
TikiWiki
MoinMoin
DokuWiki
- I've used it in the past, and it's super lightweight and simple
Etherpad
Note new features include wiki-style links and twitter-style tags (cf http://metameso.org:9000/landing and http://piratepad.net/ep/tag/ respectively), as well as as well as a "real time" recent changes page (cf http://metameso.org/~joe/pages/gravpad-mockup.html for a demo). These features will all be in the mainline branch of etherpad after this weekend. Maybe Etherpad isn't going to be a contender to become P2PU's "main" wiki yet (though it would likely meet most of the requirements specified above), but still, these new features would probably be useful to enable in course-level Etherpad installations.
Votes for MediaWiki:
+1 John Britton
+1 Markun
(i find it hard to vote before we've decided what we need, and what options exist)
Losers - don't support features
TWiki
- no right to left text support.
MindTouch Wiki
- John also got us a free hosted account from dekiwiki, which is open source but hard to self-host, so we should also evaluate that before choosing something else.
- no right to left text support.
Blocked in China
Another important problem with the current wiki, is that it's blocked in China. This is because it's hosted by PBWiki, which might host other wikis that are critical to the Chinese government, etc. Given the centrality of the wiki in our current operations, that means that launching a Chinese mainland P2PU (which I have big plans to do this coming summer) will be impossible.
This is obviously a tricky subject - even if we hosted the wiki ourselves, on our own IP, there is no guarantee that it would not be blocked. And I certainly don't suggest that P2PU self-censor and do not accept certain course topics, because they might be critical to China etc. That will always be a challenge with operating in China. However, at least we'd be blocked on our own grounds, not because of somebody else.
Some of the tools that individual courses use might also be blocked in China, but in this case, the courses that are running in Chinese might be aware of this, and choose to use alternative tools, that's easier to deal with.