WYSIWYG Wiki Wanted
I love wiki technology for its ability to allow collaboration on works in progress. I’ve used numerous wiki for work and on community projects, but nowhere did I find wiki colaboration more useful than on jointly-written college papers.
For my senior year capstone project I worked on a student team to crunch out a daunting 40 page paper analyzing everything about Netflix and its business model. There was no way our team members (who all had full-time work and attended school at night) could arrange our schedules to consistently work together at the same time. We had to do it from home, but we really didn’t want the hassle of losing pieces in email and having to merge 10 different versions of assigned chunks on the last day.
Our project wiki saved our collective butt. With it we could work remotely on one document, editing each other’s errors as we went, making sure we didn’t have duplicate content, patching our work together using a unified tone, etc. If you are a student that has to work on large group papers, please learn how to use wiki.
The only problem we had was that there was a bit of a learning curve, especially for the non-technical members of my group. That’s where a WYSIWYG editor would really have come in handy. I may be off here, but I think the real value of a wiki is the collaboration aspect. Collaboration trumps easy markup syntax, and a WYSIWYG editor would definitely make it easier for more people to contribute to a project. More editors means better content. That’s the real point of wiki, right?
My talented friend Tyler made a really smooth and simple Windows-based wiki that employed this principle. Could anyone recommend any good PHP, Perl, or Python-based WYSIWYG wiki packages for Linux? I wish MediaWiki offered some sweet WYSIWYG, but alas, it doesn’t –although the Wikiwyg project seems to be making some progress in that direction.
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Tags: Education, MediaWiki, Netflix, Online Collaboration, Technology, Tyler Jensen, Wiki, WYSIWYG
September 8th, 2006 at 6:44 am
Jordy,
Why don’t you use Writely or Zoho Writer for collaborative projects like that?
I suppose it means needing email addresses for those you want to invite.
Neal
September 8th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Why not plug in one of the excellent editors already out there? For example, incorporate the FCKEditor or Tinymce (ok, maybe not Tinymce on Linux)? I was able to turn some sample wiki CF code into a useful WYSISYG editor in less than 10 minutes that way. And as far as I know the licensing is fairly friendly.
September 8th, 2006 at 8:51 am
All you need to do is include tinymce into mediawiki.
Clint
September 8th, 2006 at 10:06 am
A co-worker of mine has created many instances of mediawiki using fckeditor. Don’t personally know the details, but I suppose that google is your friend….
good luck.
-matt
September 8th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
I saw this at OSCON this year:
http://opengarden.org/
The dekiwiki software they build might meed your needs. Dekiwiki is the open-source wiki software developed by MindTouch to power their wiki appliance. They also have a hosted version of Dekiwiki you can try out at viawiki.com. It runs on LAMP.
This wiki software provides you a WYSIWIG experience for editing wiki pages, and also provides heirarchical page navigation. I haven’t played around with it too much, but it looks pretty cool.
September 9th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
You’re buying in to the “Hive Mind” mentality. Pretty soon we will all be Borgs, and there will be no such thing as individual works of art, literature or science. To what degree are you willing to sacrifice individualism for efficiency or quality of product? Sounds like you might be turning Commi.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:33 pm
>> Jacob Poulsen Says:
>>September 9th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
>>
>>You’re buying in to the “Hive Mind” mentality. Pretty soon we will all be Borgs, and there will be no >>such thing as individual works of art, literature or science. To what degree are you willing to sacrifice >>individualism for efficiency or quality of product? Sounds like you might be turning Commi.
Say what, Jacob????????
September 21st, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Jacob is my cousin who lives in Missouri. He’s a smart guy (a doctor, actually), but he’s not real tech savvy. He figures that, instead of sending an occasional email saying “hi”, it’s pretty funny to ping my blog with a BS comment every once in a while. I tend to agree, but I wish he would put a disclosure on his posts. Something like: “This has been another BS blog spam by Jordy’s dumb cousin. Please do not, under any circumstances, take me or anything I say the slightest bit seriously.”
That should do it. :)
September 23rd, 2006 at 7:38 pm
I thought it was obvious by the tone of the post that I was being facetious. However, there really is a counter-movement to wiki technology. There is a Newsweek article that highlights this movement. The movement stems from an article by Jaron Lanier in the online magazine Edge entitled Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. His argument is that some people have elevated online collectivism as a modern source of wisdom. Indeed Newsweek has an article called The New Wisdom of the Web that details the many new sites utilizing this concept (Digg, Flickr, MySpace, del.icio.us, YouTube, Craiglist) where the content of the site is primarily supplied by the users. Since you are so “tech savvy” I figured that you would pick up that my post was merely a satirical spoof of Jaron and his ilk.
September 23rd, 2006 at 7:41 pm
You’re right. I am not tech savvy. I just realized none of my hyperlinks worked. Here are the articles that I tried to reference in my post:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638212/site/newsweek/
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/
September 23rd, 2006 at 7:43 pm
Ha ha, I’m retarded.
September 24th, 2006 at 12:58 am
You should keep that . . . for posterity
October 26th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Groupswiki might do ya!
http://www.groupswiki.com/
July 28th, 2007 at 9:55 am
We have just started a project called MediaWiki+FCKeditor. Check it out:
http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net
I hope you’ll enjoy it.
FredCK
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Frederico Caldeira Knabben
Project Manager, FCKeditor
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http://www.fckeditor.net