Few people have asked me about a reliable hosted wiki platform. I thought I will put my thoughts in the form of a post in this blog. Before I discuss about hosted wiki platforms, I want to make sure that I convey my bias towards Mediawiki as the Wiki platform. In my opinion, it is the most powerful of all the wiki platforms. However, Mediawiki has a reasonably steep learning curve and I cannot recommend it to newbies. Also, Wikimedia foundation, the home of Mediawiki, doesn’t offer a hosted version of MediaWiki. Many people prefer to have a hosted version instead of going through a geeky installation process. There are many third party MediaWiki hosts but they are not from the original developers and hence people’s (especially business community’s) reluctance to go with them.
In recent times, I was playing around with many hosted Wiki sites like Wikidot, Wik.is, Pbwiki and Wikispaces. All of them have features that will help you get your Wiki running without any problems. Compared to MediaWiki, these hosted Wiki platforms are much more “user friendly”, making it a cake walk even for newbies. In fact, you can do a comparison of various Wiki platforms in the Wikimatrix website. Frequently, I come across questions about the best hosted wiki platform from my company’s clients, my friends and my social networking contacts. I often refer them to sites like Wikidot.com or Wik.is. In fact, I use Wikidot.com for a couple of projects and Wik.is for the third project. Both these Wiki platforms are extremely good and they are very user friendly, with good “mashup support”. Deki Wiki, the wiki that powers Wik.is, is very well integrated with the web services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. Both Wikidot.com and Wik.is can solve your Wiki needs without any difficulty for the users. My support for these two Wiki platforms doesn’t mean that Pbwiki and Wikispaces are a bad choice.
I will explain why I selected Wikidot.com and Wik.is over Pbwiki.com and Wikispaces.com here. When I consider the options for a hosted wiki, whether it is for personal purposes or business purposes, I have to take into account the long term stability of the platform. Some of the hosted Wiki sites have very good financial backing and these companies might be there for a long haul. However, this is not the case with every company that offers Wiki as the hosted platform. Sometimes, it is difficult to ascertain the stability of a company on which we are going to trust our personal or business data. There is always the danger of the hosted Wiki company shutting its doors and vanishing in thin air. How can we foolproof our personal wiki or business wiki against such eventualities? There are two ways in which we can achieve this stability. One approach is to ensure that your Wiki company offers you a way to export all your data in open formats. Now a days, many Wiki companies allow this export of data. We can then take the data to another hosted wiki company and get it imported. The second approach is to find a hosted wiki company that also offers the Wiki platform in one of the open source licenses. Suppose if the wiki company goes out of business, you will still have the application available to install in your own servers or in the computing cloud. You are completely safe even if the company that hosted your wiki is out of business. Since the wiki is released under open source license, there will still be developers working on the Wiki development. This offers you continuity with your wiki platform and your investment, both financial and time, is completely protected.
I prefer the second approach over the first and this forms the basis for my recommendation of Wikidot.com and Wik.is. You get a long term stability with your wiki platform irrespective of what happens to the company behind the wiki. I consider this to be very crucial in everyone’s wiki strategy.
Do you have a favorite hosted Wiki platform? Do you have an underlying reason to choose the platform. Feel free to share your experience here.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Thanks for mentioning MindTouch Wik.is. I think you’re absolutely correct in looking for a provider that is open source for the reason you cite above. I think it’s also important to evaluate the strength of that product’s open source community too. For example, MindTouch’s Deki Wiki, which is what powers Wik.is is downloaded more than 2000 times a day and has a massive community of users and contributors behind it. The community has translated the application into more than 15 languages, ported it to several operating systems and linux distros, and is very active in documenting the platform. Because of the massive size of the community it’s certain that Deki Wiki (the wiki platform that powers Wik.is) will continue dramatically outpace the competition.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I do agree about the strength of the community behind an open source project. It is very vital.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I just wanted to point out another hosted wiki option: Luminotes, a personal wiki notebook with a focus on simplicity. Not only can you download the contents of your entire wiki in HTML with a single click, but the software is completely open source. You can can check it out at http://luminotes.com/
(Disclaimer: I’m a Luminotes developer.)
March 25th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Good summary Krish. I tried http://www.pmwiki.com and http://tiddlywiki.com . The first one is much like other wikis, online edit etc. while the tiddly works offline also (a single html file). I use it as a notebook.
But my needs are different - like online collaboration of research papers that carry figures and equations that need iterative editing. I find not many of the freely available self-hosted wikis a bit wanting in this requirement. Any suggestions?
(both tiddlywiki and pmwiki offer plugins to suit our needs, but then they need to be hosted in our servers - which is how I have it now)
Cheers,
Arunn
March 30th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Arunn,
Sorry for the delayed approval. I think the two links you inserted has moved it to Spam.
Check out Wikidot.com. It allows equations through its rich editor. Since they also have an open source version, you might be safe.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
[...] in the case of SaaS vendor going out of business. As I have explained in some of the previous posts, businesses can take the source code and their data and host it anywhere in the cloud. Since the [...]
June 11th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
We use Pmwiki, great for newbies, no mysql, open source and easy to install.