Eventually, I decided to go with Wikispaces.

I thought my expectations towards wiki to be quite typical, so I was quite surprised that it was so hard to find a suitable solution. My basic requirements for the wiki were the following:

• Should be hosted
• Should preferably look as simple and clean as Wikipedia
• Should preferably NOT look or feel like Sharepoint
• Should demand as little overhead as possible ? for example provide a WYSIWYG editor
• Should be cheap, at least in the beginning

I found some helpful sites giving an overview of the wiki landscape, including:

• Wiki page with list of wiki solutions
• WikiMatrix? really nicely done dynamic matrix comparing different wikis

In the end I established some intimacy with the following wikis:

• Confluence
• Editme
• eTouch SamePage
• Jotspot
• Socialtext
• Stikipad
• Wikispaces

Below, rather than a detailed review (I have full time job, sorry), a report on impressions along the way.

Jotspot: promising but inaccessible

Actually from the very start I expected Jotspot, about which I had somehow heard before, to become my wiki of choice. Reading its website and some press releases made it seem to offer everything I could ever want for my modest goals, and some more on top of that.

I was especially curious about the integration capabilities Jotspot established with salesforce.com and Google maps, among others, even if I saw no immediate use for that at this moment.

Unfortunately, after registering the trial wiki my experience with Jotspot never really went beyond this:

The site just didn’t load. Customer service was as prompt ? which was appreciated ? as unhelpful in providing any assistance regarding the problem. Maybe they should buy additional server or maybe two.

Update: afterwards I managed to log in once and it seemed to work.. but now it’s down again.

Editme

Editme looks very cute, but when I tried the demo, the editor failed to show up for some reason.

Socialtext: wait till we approve your application

Socialtext seems to boast at least as sophisticated solution as Jotspot. But it turned out you can?t establish a trial wiki without waiting for manual decision of their customer service. After Jotspot I valued my time, and just moved along.

Update: I received a confirmation later, so I will be able to give it a try. As of first impression, I like the double click edit functionality, but yes, the interface seems a bit intimidating at first glance.

eTouch SamePage: too much like Sharepoint

SamePage made me feel as if I stumbled into an ultimate solution: not only it allowed me to create a wiki, but inside the package I found a blog, forum, news integrator, and lots of other things.

However, even if the feature set is impressive, the complexity makes it a pain to work with. At least in the beginning.

Cryptic urls SamePage generates reminds that it is derived from a full blown CMS solution. Flexible, but not without a cost.

After some playing around, trying unsuccessfully to make it look closer to the way I wanted, I started again to search for something simpler.

Stikipad

It’s hard for me to write about Stikipad because it should be very close to my ideal solution. Clean and simple. So why I didn’t go for it? Maybe it’s because I couldn’t change the default template, which I didn’t like, in the trial version. It would truly be the power of the default.. I don’t know.

Confluence

I was directed to Confluence by this blog. The website suggests that it can be quite a friendly application, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a mass market hosted version (even though the company referred me to some of their partners who can provide hosting service).

Wikispaces: right on target

Wikispaces look simple and elegant, and not unlike Wikipedia.

In no time I could customize the template a bit, and add my own temporary logo. Great start.

Interface takes just a moment to learn, which is also due to, let?s be honest, quite basic feature set. But roughly everything I need is there. The editor is also simple, yet offers an acceptable level of control over the looks of the page.

One thing I don?t like is that the files uploaded to the wiki, and I expect to upload quite a few, all land in one common directory. Further into future and I expect the place to get quite messy because of that. I would much prefer for every page to have its own filespace with some common root storage for things like logo, perhaps.

The other thing is that visual editor is having some problems when I try, for example, to format selected text. But I learned to bypass it by using text mode editor.

As far as I understood I would have to pay 5$ a month from the start, in order to have my wiki private. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a big price spike if the number of users exceeds 5, as it is in case with most of the other providers.

Now I’m using it for some time already and found no show stoppers yet. My friend also seems to be happy with it. So far so good.

Using Wikipedia as a representative of the emerging ?cult of the amateur?, he examined some sample deliverables of this new mode of production. Compared with work of the professionals, in this particular case Encyclopedia Britannica, the results were rather unimpressive, to say the least. Clearly, the exhibits made it hard to imagine that any respectable researcher would use Wikipedia as an authoritative reference.

At that point I felt an urge to write a longer comment to this topic. It seemed ridiculous to me to even consider Wikipedia as an authoritative reference and compare it with professional work. Regardless of whatever the Wikipedians might be saying, I felt that no one serious would expect authority from Wikipedia. That said, lack of authority doesn?t negate in any way how useful Wikipedia can be.

In fact, I use Wikipedia almost everyday. It?s my ?top of mind? source of information as far as exploring new topics is concerned. Wikipedia makes a perfect ?quick backgrounder? as Jane Perrone put it. But a reference source to base on?

The idea of quality that I personally like is the one focused on measuring extent to which the given product fulfills particular needs. It?s not an objective measure. As a result, Wikipedia might be argued to provide good quality if you put high weight on having a broad scope, high availability and a rich set of further references. You cannot depend on it as far as a constant level of accuracy is concerned, but if all you need is a quick overview and pointers to more respectable sources, you don?t care much.

Nicholas, however, made the point clear today without my help:

Wikipedia is not an authoritative encyclopedia, and it should stop trying to be one. It’s a free-for-all, a rumble-tumble forum where interested people can get together in never-ending, circular conversations and debates about what things mean. Maybe those discussions will resolve themselves into something like the truth. Maybe they won’t. Who cares?

Still, there is a second part of argument left from the ?Amorality?? piece. Even if it doesn?t happen every day, sometimes you need an authoritative source for a given topic. Currently it?s the one provided by the professionals. However, since amateur production can meet the daily ?quality? requirements of most of us, the professionals may not be able to survive competition with the free product that for most of the time is ?good enough?.

You can try to fix the financial model behind Britannica, which may look as increasingly serving professionals rather than the population in general. Or you can try to imagine an improved Wikipedia model that would be able to ensure accuracy and become an authoritative source. After all, why I trust Linux if I need to run mission-critical computing, but I cannot trust Wikipedia for mission-critical research?