Wiki Project
My first stop in this wiki exploration was to the following site.
http://www.wikimatrix.org/ Having a chance to see all the options out there I decided to
focus my search to 3 wikis that seem to be widely used by our members. These wikis
were, Wikispaces, PB wiki and Wet Paint. I enlisted Valerie and Carie to help explore
each of these wikis. We immediately decided to eliminate the Wet Paint site for the
following reasons, first a CG group had used it and their page ended up giving various
members a computer virus and the sample wikis we looked at seemed too glossy and
didn’t seem to have tools we were looking for.
The following list is what we were looking for in a wiki for EDUCAUSE
Access control:
Groups can set who has edit rights to a particular wiki.
o Ability to add people and permission levels (PB, WS)
WikiSpaces permission levels: Types depend on subscription level.
Public, Protected, Private, Custom (This is where you can have the
most control over who can do and access what)
PB permission levels: Administrator, Editor, Writer, Reader, Page-
level only, Remove access
Workspace Security: (View or Edit: Anyone or only people
invited and approved)
Ability to create private wikis and restrict access (both PB and WS provide this
ability)
Attachments and Widgets
Attach files to wiki
o Scribd (WS)
Plugins & Widgets
o Maps (WS)
o Photos and Slideshows (PB, WS)
o Videos (WS)
YouTube (PB,WS)
Odeo (WS)
Blip.TV (WS)
Google Video (WS)
TeacherTube (WS)
Yahoo Video (WS)
o Bitty Browsers (WS)
o Chat
Gabbly (WS)
o Calendars
Google (WS)
Airset (WS)
30 boxes (WS)
o Spreadsheets
Google (WS)
NumSum (WS)
Edit Grid (WS)
o Cloud Tag (WS)
o Page Tags (WS)
o RSS Feed (PB,WS)
o Skype (WS)
o Surveys
Survey Gizmo (WS)
o Table of Contents (WS)
o Other
Yackpack (WS)
Meebo (WS)
Browser compatibility:
Wiki should be compatible with the latest versions of Firefox and IE
Discussion Options: Ability to comment on content
o PB Wiki comment section is on the bottom of each page
o Wikispaces comment section is a tab at the top of each page, you can also remove
ability to have a discussion or add more than one discussion tab per page.
Intuitive Editing: One of the benefits to the current system is that great tab structure at
the top with "Edit." If it's not intuitive about how to dive in, that's more questions that we
have to answer.
Navigation: Ability to build and display wiki navigation.
o Anchor Links Ability to use anchor links to jump around the text.
o Table of Contents widget (PB, WS)
Navigation display
o PBWiki has a “home” then links on the right side to secondary pages in
the wiki navigation.
The PB wiki has several “navigation” options on the right side, but they
aren’t intuitive and slightly disorganized. My concern about the many
options for possible navigation is that a group will use all of them at once
and the wiki will end up disorganized and frustrating for members.
Options include; Starred Pages, putting pages into folders, or
adding them to the sidebar
o WikiSpaces allows ability to create navigation on the upper left side,
includes ability to move navigation links up or down in group.
Subfolders
Notification: Ability to set up notification e-mail when changes to wiki are made,
including discussion entries (PB WS)
Reference Tools
Footnotes
Embed Reference Text
Inserting Special Characters (WS)
Search/Tag
Individual Wiki Search
Ability to Tag pages
SSO/Federated Identity Management:
Ability to use EDUCAUSE profile for login if possible