Software > Buying & Owning Software, Graphics & Publishing, Office Applications

Choosing Wiki Software

By Jeremy Wallace

In this article we look at wiki software options, and how to choose a wiki that’s right for you.

This article is courtesy of Idealware, which provides candid information to help nonprofits choose effective software. For more articles and reviews, go to www.idealware.org.

There are dozens of affordable, widely used wiki platforms - these tools are often called wiki engines. They range from free, open-source tools like MediaWiki (the engine behind Wikipedia) to commercial, enterprise-ready solutions such as Confluence. With so many wiki engines out there, how will you decide which one to use?

Start by spending some time considering how your wiki will be used, and by whom. Will your users be highly technical, or just barely comfortable with computers? Will you be opening your wiki to the general public or will this be something for internal use? Will some sections of the wiki be more locked down than others? What is your budget? (Many wikis are free. Some cost over £500!) Do you have a staff member capable of maintaining a complex web application or will you want an outsider to take care of these tasks? Is it important that staff are able to print out sections of the wiki as one continuous document?

Once you have the answers to those questions, you can start the process of comparing wikis. What should you look for? Obviously, your specific needs may vary, but there are a few key things to consider.

Hosted or Installed

If, like many small organisations you don’t have people in-house with technology expertise, you’ll most likely want to use a hosted solution. With a hosted application, also known as Software-As-a-Service, the company that makes the wiki engine will keep their software and your text on their own servers, and you will simply access it like any other web site. Some hosted plans are free and some cost as much as £25 per month.

If, on the other hand, you have someone on staff with sufficient web technology skills, and with enough time to manage one more web application, you may want to download the software and install it on your own server. Many of the wikis you can install are free, but some cost over £500.

Tools for Editing

Although techies generally find wikis easy to use, others may take time to become comfortable with using them. The ease of formatting the text varies from one wiki tool to another. Some allow text formatting with a familiar graphic interface, while others require specific text tags (for instance, asterisks to indicate bullet points, or surrounding text with _ characters for underlining).

As discussed above, wikis generally let you edit the information on web pages in one of two ways. Some allow you to use a WYSIWYG editor like that in Microsoft Word, which allows you to click a button to make text bold or italics. With this type of editor, your view of the text while you're editing is more or less the same look as what the all the readers will see.

Without a WYSIWYG editor, you’ll instead need to use what’s called a markup language. A markup language allows you to do some fancy formatting of your wiki pages, using only a text editor. This involves tricks like creating bulleted lists by putting an asterisk at the start of each line, typing h1, h2, or h3 to format different levels of headings, and surround text you want underlined with _ characters.

An in-between solution is an editor with shortcut buttons like a WYSIWYG editor, which generates markup language. You can still click a button to make text bold, but instead of seeing the text instantly become bold on the page, the selected text is marked off *with asterisks, like this*. This can allow beginners to edit pages while helping them learn the basic markups.

Though most markup languages are fairly simple, and the best ones are extremely easy to use, not everyone will be comfortable learning something like this. Most wiki engines either have a WYSIWYG editor built in, or one that can be added on. Almost all wikis will let you use a markup language. If your users are on the less technical side of things, prioritise a WYSIWYG editor in the list of features you look for in a wiki engine.

Files or Database

Some wikis store each page as a separate text file, while others store them as records in a database. If you are using an installed wiki engine on your own server, a file-based wiki may make backups easier—you can simply make a copy of the directory that holds those files and you’ll be all set. But a wiki that uses a database to store your content will make some key activities (like renaming a page after it has been created) a lot easier.

Subscribing to Changes

Email notification—the ability for a user to sign up to receive a message every time the contents of a page (or even an entire space) are changed - can be a powerful feature, but not all wikis offer it. Some wikis also offer an RSS feed of changes, for those that prefer to receive information to a feedreader like Google Reader or Bloglines rather than to their email inbox. Either of these notification methods can be particularly useful to allow nervous documentation owners to review every change, if they want.

No, Really: Which Wiki Will We Want? A Personal View

Well, I can’t say that I’ve spent significant time using more than a handful of wiki engines, but I'm familiar with MediaWiki , DokuWiki, PhpWiki, and Confluence. For my needs, Confluence is the clear winner—it’s got an extremely clean look, is absolutely packed with features, stores content in a database of your choosing, and has a dead-simple markup language. Confluence costs £650 for an installed version or £30/month if they host it, but non-profits can get it for free.

One thing the other three offer that Confluence does not, though, is open source code - the ability to freely update or distribute the code in most any way you like. Though you can get your hands on their code if you actually pay for Confluence, you cannot re-use the code in any way other than modifying your version or contributing macros and bug fixes to the Confluence community. The other three all use versions of the popular GPL open-source license and are supported by large, active communities of open-source developers and users.

All four of these wikis require expertise and access to a server to install. To get started quickly and with minimal technology overhead, a hosted solution may be better. Two popular hosted wikis are PBWiki and Wikispaces, both of which have a free version with some limits. An upgraded Wikispaces account is available to qualifying nonprofits through Techsoup Stock . Google has recently released Google Sites as part of its Google Apps suite, based on the Jotspot hosted wiki service that they acquired. If your organisation is already using the free nonprofit edition of Google Apps, Google Sites is an easy way to get started with a wiki that will be integrated into your other Google Apps services.

Don't forget to consider the software you already have, either: if you're using a higher-end content management system to manage your website, like Plone or Drupal, these systems may also offer strong, wiki-style collaborative documentation features.

For more wikis, and much more information, WikiMatrix will let you compare a hundred or more different wiki engines. Each wiki is rated on over 100 features. As with any software application, different wikis will be more or less appropriate for different uses.

Once you’ve chosen a wiki engine, you still have a little work to do before you can start writing your pages – see the article Using Wikis [link to knowledgebase article] for more information.

Many thanks as well to Jon Stahl of ONE/ Northwest, Thomas Taylor of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance , Clark Williams-Derry of  Sightline, and Laura Quinn of Idealware, who also contributed to this article.