Only yesterday, one of the regulars in a search engines discussion group (nntp://alt.internet.search-engines) raised the following question/complaint:

Everytime I search for something on google Wikipedia appears in the top 100 results! Is it taking over the Internet?

Last night, IT guru Joel Spolsky asked for advice on Wiki for his site’s translations. He could no longer resist the productivity of a Wiki, which allows visitors to manage content while vandalistic changes can be quickly rollbacked (reversed). The matter of fact is that Wikis have become extremely ubiquitous and they are conquering the Net, much like blogs. They simplify the composition of Web pages, particularly when composition is handled and managed by a group.

Schestowitz.com has two Wikis — a private one and a public one. At some stage I found that Wikis can conveniently be used for correspondence or for collaboration in academia, e.g. when writing or revising a paper jointly.

There are all sort of reasons for using the Wiki’s simplified mark-up and not WYSIWYG interfaces (as clean as they may be) or plain HTML.

• Firstly, there is the issue of security such as off-site linking. You need to provide a subset of features. Having said that, this can be prevented by imposing restrictions on whichever composition language/method you choose.
• Secondly, one has to worry about the issue of consistency. I have a friend who manages the content of a site and I cannot recall how many times he did something invalid that broke the integrity of the entire site, which I then had to fix urgently. “More restrictive” means “less things to go wrong”. After a few weeks I completely gave up on making his pages valid XHTML/CSS. He had too much freedom and too little experience.

Finally, on the issue of software recommendation, I cannot comment on the popular MediaWiki, which is used to power Wikipedia. I have never used MediaWiki myself, but PHPWiki has been fairly stable ever since I set it up 6 months ago and had it updated many times a day. If you are looking for ease-of-use and trivial embedment of media, I suggest you go with more mainstream packages such as the admirable MediaWiki, which I am familiar with as a user, but not as an administrator.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.