There's no question that Indymedia needs a tool for collaborating on documents and compiling important information. But we also have several years of evidence that show that this wiki engine just isn't cutting it. Twiki just isn't user-friendly enough to generate the wide-spread use we need for this to be effective. I'd like to suggest the group seriously consider switching to a different Wiki engine. Two that I have experience with, and far prefer to Twiki:
1.
TikiWiki?. We're using this for the DC Indymedia intranet (
http://dc.indymediagonewild.org). It's php based w/mySQL. Aside from a friendly and powerful wiki, it also supports RSS and XML, has a forum area that allows for mirroring listserv lists, supports surveys (useful for straw polls and proposals), and has good document history features and user groups and permissions to aid with security. The developer site (opensource) is at
http://tikiwiki.org.
2.
MediaWiki?. This is the opensource wiki that is developed by and backends wikipedia. While unlike tikiwiki it just does wiki, it does that very well, and they've got a lot of experience that's gone into devleoping its usability. It also has more features than you typically see at wikipedia, so it's worth checking out the development site for a better idea of what the software can do:
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/index.php/MediaWiki_development
Getting a functioning and used wiki is really vital for the network at this point. Email lists just aren't cutting it for the level of organizing and information exchange and growth we need to help facilitate. But until we get a compelling and user friendly wiki up (and twiki ain't it), we're stuck.
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JohnWindmueller - 13 May 2004
We could maybe improve the "user-friendlyness" of our current wiki engine, and avoid the hard work needed to migrate the existing stuff to a new engine. --
IntRigeri - 30 May 2004
There was some discussion about the difficulty of upgrading Twiki based on its Perl version requirements and about trying to build up UTF support. As another argument for
TikiWiki? as an alternative...
1. It's a php script
2. It has full UTF-8 support for multilingual material.
http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=TikiWikiInternationalizationAndLanguages&highlight=UTF
By the way, we're using
TikiWiki? to start doing intranet work with the DC IMC. (
http://dc.indymediagonewild.org).
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JohnWindmueller - 3 June 2004
I just had a look, and it doesn't seem so easy... :
- to have a multilingual site doesn't seem to be possible with TikiWiki? yet (I just had a look, and what I've understood is : it's easy to have ONE TikiWiki? working for virtually any UNIQUE language, it doesn't seem possible/easy to have it work for several languages simultaneously... yet)
- TikiWiki?'s UTF-8 support strongly depends on the server's PHP version... Debian Woody has 4.1.2, and some features appear only in 4.2 or even 4.3
I sure will look a bit deeper, but I'm far from being convinced by this argument.
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IntRigeri - 04 Jun 2004
I'm going to talk with
TikiWiki? developers about what you've raised. My understanding is that running a single multi-lingual
TikiWiki? site is very do-able and well supported. But I could be wrong, so I'll work on confirming and clarifying multi-lingual support and post the details here.
If the multi-lingual support across one-site is there, along with all the other enormous improvements offered by
TikiWiki? over Twiki, then PHP version shouldn't be a sufficient obstacle to keep us locked into a wiki that isn't getting the job done for the IMC community. After all, if there's any online collaboration tool that requires a large % of user participation and intuitive and compelling features, it's a wiki.
I'm fine with batting ideas back and forth, but let's also be open to some common ground and not hinge this on whether or not you in particular are convinced Int. There's also the option of putting up an alternative
TikiWiki? site, keeping and still working on Twiki, and letting the broader IMC network choose and move toward whichever best meets their needs.
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JohnWindmueller - 16 June 2004
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