Choosing the right wiki engine
Need help choosing a wiki engine, particularly for use with a library? I’ve spent some time with a number of different options and have come down to two engines that can fill different needs.
1. PmWiki
PmWiki is, IMO, probably the single best option for a library. In fact, the Univeristy of Minnesota Libraries staff website has been running on PmWiki for almost a year now and the University of South Carolina Aiken Library’s entire site is running on it. PmWiki is highly customizable, as can be seen just in the two examples I just gave you, and uses even simpler wiki syntax that of Wikipedia’s MediaWiki (reviewed below). PmWiki allows for a range of permission settings and some interesting organizational features. It also does not require a database and instead generates flat files.
The downside to PmWiki is that installation and configuration is a bit complicated for the novice user. Setting it up isn’t necessarily that difficult, but there is a lot of editing files in text editors, so some basic programming experience would be very helpful.
2. MediaWiki
This is the engine that powers Wikipedia. As far as wiki engines go, it is very easy to set up. It has a simple configuration wizard page which will get you up and running within minutes. MediaWiki requires a MySQL database for storing all of the data which can be a good or a bad thing depending on the use, but for a library website, a system that uses flat files might be a better choice. However, in terms of features and ease of use, MediaWiki seems to be the best and most advanced. Some of the features might be necessary for certain projects, like how adding “thumb” in the wiki markup for an image link generates an attractive thumbnail.
One thing you’ll immediately notice, however, is that wikipedia seems more geared toward the large-scale public wiki. In fact, sometimes it feels like you are just getting thrown a bone from the wikipedia project. Interface customization is a little awkward, although most work can be done in CSS. A major feature that it lacks is a detailed permissions system, something that is essentially a must for wikis that aren’t meant to be edited by anyone.
Long story short, for an organizational wiki, PmWiki probably is probably the best option. For a personal website requiring the least work to configure, MediaWiki is probably perfect. In my case, I’m using MediaWiki for both my restricted personal wiki and editing our library’s staff newsletter while I’m using PmWiki for our extensive departmental documentation.
The two wiki engines cited here are my two favorites, but there are many, many more. For a good amount of detailed info, see the C2 wiki. There are other big wiki engines mentioned there, but none of them seem to do the job as smoothly as the ones mentioned above. And for a nice comparison table of some other big engines see here.
One of the problems with the wiki world right now is that documentation is sparse, to say the least. Finding out how to do something relatively simple can be difficult, but with enought Googling and digging around you should be able to find the answer to most questions. Make sure to get on any listservs you can find since those seem to be where the bulk of the support happens.