Choosing My Wiki Way

Just a few weeks ago I decided to spring something new on the staff of our newspaper -- a wiki. Currently, communication around our office is a mish-mash of e-mail and iChat, with an FTP server and posted signs on the wall completing the picture. While we use blog technology extensively for the site that we offer the public, internal blogs have failed as a way for us to communicate with one another.

After only about a day of explaining what a wiki is (everyone liked that it was based on the Hawaiian word for "quick"), I set one up for them to use. The idea with a wiki is that you can easily create and edit simple website simply by typing into HTML forms.

On the editorial side, they took to it like wildfire. All of the sudden we had an entire quarter year of issues tracked, with special entries for the office supplies they needed, the phone numbers and e-mail messages of the photographers and a few angry missives from the editor about how everyone is missing their deadlines and needed to stick to the style guide.

The wiki was a hit.

The problem was: Swiki, the service that I decided to use because it was (a.) free and (b.) offered secure wiki sites, only available to people with a password. Apparently Swiki is notoriously unreliable, and, soon after the editors had taken to it like flies on spit (yes, I know the real saying) Swiki up and disappeared.

Since then I've been looking for an alternative, but the editors haven't quite taken to a new wiki with the same gung-ho attitude. In particular, I'd settled in with XWiki, which the salespeople and I have been using to track our calls on advertisers and to note what ads need to be designed. XWiki is great stuff and getting better all the time. In particular I like that you can turn pages into PDFs with the click of a button, and I like the way each page could handle comments.

Then, today, I finally got my codes for a beta test site at Jotspot, the "latest and greatest" think in wiki-stuff. I'd have started with Jotspot if they'd have gotten me a beta site sooner, but apparently they're doing it by hand. (JotSpot is a cool startup that's got original Excite developers involved.) The reason I wanted to try it so bad is that Jotspot is going further with little WikiApps than anyone else so far, enabling you to create forms and accept input, keep track of events in calendars, track your contacts and generally do some cool stuff. There's even a Customer Relationship Manager, which is a whole other quest I've been on for our sales office.

So there I was, tooling around in Jotspot, when I got an inspiration to check Swiki. Lo and behold, it was up again! I quickly cut and paste page after page from the old EditWiki to a new one I'd established at JotSpot. Then I created accounts and invited the editors to the new incarnation of their old wiki. So far, they're pretty excited.

The question at this point will be -- JotSpot or XWiki? Jot is slick -- you can add to a wiki page by e-mailing to it, which is interesting for, say, adding items that editors should read from the local paper or for writers to send in stories. It's also not clear how much it's going to cost when they get out of beta mode. It'll probably be more than a few pennies rubbed together.

XWiki, on the other hand, is more home-grown, but it offers page commenting, attachments to pages and other impressive features. It's still one of the better-looking wikis, and in a few short days I've gotten used to its syntax and some of its idiosyncracies. (It's one of the few wikis I've come across which doesn't use WikiWords. WikiWords actually lose their charm after a while, but they are handy for quickly creating new links and pages.)

More than likely it'll boil down to cost. If JotSpot ends up too expensive, or if the applications simply aren't worth it (so far I'm actually less than dazzled by the CRM, although there isn't one that has dazzled me enough to keep using it) then I'll probably switch back to XWiki. But I'm going to play with Jot for a little while longer and see if it takes with the rest of the crew.

Regardless, there's something to this wiki thing. If you've got a reasonably tech-savvy group that needs to share some text, plan projects and track changes to things, then a wiki might be worth a look.