Comments on: Why MediaWiki is not the right Wiki product for my clients?

By: Danny Oldman

Danny Oldman — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:03:43 +0000

Dan, I completely agree with you. I manage IT for a 450 man advertising agency. Since the majority of our staff is young, we thought a Wiki would be adopted fairly quickly. But most people hated the whole wiki syntax. It made them feel like programmers. Its been 8 months since then, we have been evaluating various collaboration software, including Sharepoint and Lotus connections, along with Social text, Confluence and Cyn.in. We finally decided to go with cyn.in because of their neat user interface, fast search and the fact that is open source too.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:01:00 +0000

I used Atlassian’s Confluence before, and now I work for Atlassian, so, needless to say, I think it’s good stuff.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

By: Alan Lepofskt

Alan Lepofskt — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:36:30 +0000

Dan, thanks for the nice comments about Socialtext. In your follow up post on this topic, I added some more details about some of the new things at Socialtext. I hope you find them interesting, and see how we differ from the competition.

By: Chris Yeh

Chris Yeh — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:03:10 +0000

If you’re really focused on providing an easy to use solution for your clients, PBwiki is generally considered the easiest-to-use.

It’s hosted, so you don’t have to worry about hosting, and it’s been repeatedly picked as the best or easiest wiki to use:

http://pbwiki.com/content/Press

And we have a ton of consultants and professional services folks using our product.

By: Ponderings and Wanderings

Ponderings and Wanderings — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:30:28 +0000

[...] I placed up my post about MediaWiki I have received some feedback from individuals and companies. I have now tired out [...]

By: Jan Mazereeuw

Jan Mazereeuw — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 06:45:18 +0000

Although I am not as conversant in the different wiki markup languages, options, packages that are out there, I would have to agree that in order to assure whatever’wiki’ tool is adopted by the user base, it MUST be easy to use.
We’re just ramping up on the requirements definition and tool selection for our first Intranet and want to ensure we get as much participation on the create and contribute front. With this goal in mind, an easy to use text editor is on the top of my list. Users are used to the ease of formatting in Word and should not be forced to learn a language or any syntax in order to publish.
Keep It Simple!

By: Dan Katz

Dan Katz — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:30:30 +0000

Thanks ED. Checking this out now and will supplement the post with an update soon.

Please everyone out there – recommend more options. I have received a few emails as well. It is clear that a lot of people find MediaWiki inadequate.

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:21:18 +0000

I agree with you that Mediaiwki is not the wiki for most office staff personnel. Wiki syntax is a foriegn language to them that they do not want to learn and maintaining the numerous extensions you need to make attractive is a bear. However, I would challenge you on SocialText. It has it’s good points, but after evaluating it along with Mediawiki I turned to Mindtouch Deki. It has an awesome interface, great editor and a very active development community. Check it out at http://wiki.mindtouch.com/. Plus, it is much easier to install and tweak than SocialText.