Wiki Engines Comments

Conundrum : keeping around two lists of WikiEngines on this page, under two different sort orders, violates OnceAndOnlyOnce. But I don't at the moment see how the Wiki could support a single list and two sort orders. Any ideas?

: How is this an issue? Are people dropping by looking for Wikis whose name begins with a Q? Is there some purpose for alphabetization? How does this empower the reader? .. It doesn't! It's not useful. Nuke the duplicate list. The only reason for it's existence is to avoid duplication of entries.. but since each language has their entries sorted, that's handled well enough as it is. -- Sy

: Yes, some people probably ARE looking for a Wiki whose name begins with a certain letter. The duplicate list is helpful for those who come looking for more info on a particular Wiki engine but don't know what language it's written in. - Rich

: Hrm, good point.. but couldn't a user just do a basic search for the name of the engine? (even pointing google at c2.com would work) It feels like a terrible duplication of effort to have two manually-maintained lists. Of course, I'd prefer some sort of coding to pull together content from list-pages, but I'm dreaming. =) -- Sy

: Option. Keep the list of wiki's in XML, with information such as language etc. Use XSLT to draw out the two lists, first grouped by language, second sorted by name, possibly even third (own choice :-) sorted by popularity? I'll help if needed. DaveP.

Wish List:

• WikiEnginesWanted, WikiForumsWanted
• Also, what's the smallest WikiEngine? Find out in ShortestWikiContest.
• It would be nice, if important features of the WikiEngines would be annotated in the description
  • V = Versioning
  • C = CVS
  • N = Email Notification
  • I = Interwiki
  • H = embedded HTML
  • S = StructuredText
  • F = File attachments
  • R = RSS feeds
  • P = Plain text back-end
  • A = Access control (ownership, permissions)
  • DB = Database: none (data stored in generic files), MySQL, Postgres, etc.
  • U = Unix-like Links Structure (Symbol / makes one page inside another once only)
  • MU = Multiple Unix-like Links Structure (Symbol / makes one inside another and so on)
  • ...
• I think someone should perhaps put up their WikiEnginesRecommended? lists so that people have some idea of what is good at an overview level -- WikiEngineReview was headed in this direction -- I chose TWiki -- RandyKramer - 7 Apr 2003
• a personal wiki (more friendly than just a word document or an html editor or dhtml editor) - Maybe it misses the point (group collaboration) but can be a start point for wiki-ing. Wouldn't miss the point if it was also an InterWiki. Small, distributed devices could use page time stamps to see if they have the latest version locally held. Network traffic would be kept low so this would be useful for devices connected to the net via wireless GPRS, UMTS, WLAN etc. There should be a low bandwidth WikiWebTransferProtocol -- MelPullen - 2003-08-07.

search for emacs-wiki.el...it does all that.

• an easy intranet wiki (for non server oriented people)
• I added a "legend string" to TWiki -- if you use a different Wiki, why not do the same for it. -- RandyKramer - 7 Apr 2003

Even more confusing... compare the list of 'non-public wikis' above to this page: NonPublicWikiEngines. Two completely independent lists?? I added a link up there to the other page.

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Moved from WikiEngineTaxonomy

It would be very useful to have a picture of the evolution of WikiEngines from WardsWiki to the panoply of Wiki clones we see today. Some WikiEngines are forks, and others are rewrites.

The Unix world has a number of evolutionary diagrams showing forks and merges - how about something similar for Wikis to help in understanding how they've evolved? -- RichardDonkin

This will probably be a more fruitful exercise once the competition dies down a little, and several key competitors emerge. It would be a wasted effort drawing up a tree diagram for the multitude of engines listed above.

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what about pure html,javascript wiki? (forcing to be client side)

And another duplicated list at NonPublicWikiForums added a link up there...

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Do people (who are looking for a wiki) care what it is written in or are the target environment more important? For me, I care a little about language from a fix problems point of view but I am more worried about whether they run standalone on a particular OperatingSystem, require any web or application server or require some runtime library. As such, I think a table with the products sorted alphabetically and this this supplementary information included would be appropriate:

  SomeWiki?, standalone, Java VM
  OtherWiki?, standalone, Windows
  ExampleWiki?, IIS, Windows
  NotherWiki?, Apache, ModPerl

etc.

-- PaulRuane