Choosing a Wiki for Web 2.0

The essence of web 2.0 is for your visitors to contribute their own content. The appeal of this from a website's owner is that:

• It makes for a richer user experience
• It relieves you of the responsibility for all the content
• By working together, people accomplish amazing things

Some of the hallmarks of a web 2.0 site are:

• Blogging
• Forums
• Wiki Pages
• Social Networking

So we're looking for a system that can support these features.

When I first got started, all I wanted was to be able to create a wiki. I thought wikipedia was pretty neat and I love creating knowledge, so I thought, "why not use mediawiki?" MediaWiki is the software behind wikipedia. I was ecstatic to find that siteground offered installation with their package and I was very tempted. But I noticed that there were other options, including PHPWiki and TikiWiki. There was some description on siteground that lead me to investigate more.

I came circuitously to a comparison page on wikipedia which showed me many more wiki software options. I also came to the feature page of tikiwiki, which opened my eyes to the other options outside of just wiki pages that I would need to accomplish the site I wanted to create. I was also led to the open source community, sourceforge (which inspired the name of my site KarateForge.com). These pages led me to create the feature list above, to which I added the following requirements:

• Must be free (very important);
• Must be easy to administer;
• Must install easily on my hosting service;
  
• Must be seamless among the modules;
• Must be supported by a large enough community to protect the investment of my time, and to help me when I got stuck.
  

I won't take you through all the evaluations. I signed up for wikipedia, made some changes. I actually installed mediawiki myself, which is not straight-forward, and also found it a learning experience everytime I wanted to administer something. I read blogs, and I installed tikiwiki, too.

The upshot is, tikiwiki had

• All the features that I needed and more;
• It was free;
• The modules are all built-in and maintained for each release - so nothing breaks when you upgrade. So far I've upgraded several times from 1.9.4 to 1.9.7 without a problem;
  
• It was much easier to administer than mediawiki;
• It installed easily on siteground;
• It had a large developer base of about 350 contributors and is actively supported;
• The community, especially the mailing list on sourceforge.org, has been very helpful.

I installed and began using tikiwiki.

My next post will talk about the installation experience for our new site, how2why4.com.