Appendix A: Wiki Clones and Selection Criteria

From WolfWikis

1. Leuf, B., & Cunningham, W. (2001). The Wiki way: Quick collaboration on the web. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Chapter two—section on wiki clones

2. Ebersbach, Anja, Markus Glaser, and Richard Heigl."Wiki: Web Collaboration." New York: Springer-Verlag, 2005.

Page. 17-18.

3. Challborn, Carl and Teresa Reimann. "Wiki Products: A Comparison." The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 6.2 (July 2005) ISSN: 1492-3831.

Product trials and brief information on the following wiki clones:

i. EditMe
ii. MediaWiki
iii. Seedwiki
iv. Socialtext
v. Swiki.net
vi. WikkiTikkiTavi
vii. InterWiki

The conclusion from this article is:

“The wiki has clear potential in distance education, allowing users to brainstorm ideas with an unlimited number of people around the world, and to collaborate with them in exchanging files and developing webpages. The evaluation team has been particularly impressed by the comprehensive features pf Seedwiki, and has used it to good effect in distance education situations. EditMe and Swiki.net are good alternatives. MediaWiki and WikkiTikkiTavi are comprehensive products enabling users to host their own wikis, while InterWiki provides a useful distribution service across multiple servers. Socialtext is a more costly option designed for collaborative project work in the corporate environment. It is hoped that an increasing number of educators will encourage their students to develop the simple online editing and sharing skills that make wikis useful.”

4. Schwartz, Linda, Sharon Clark, Mary Cossarin, and Jim Rudolph, "Educational Wikis: Features and Selection Criteria" International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 5, no. 1 (April 2004).

Includes Wiki selection criteria in Appendix two of this thesis.

5. Very long list of wiki clones from WikiWikiWeb: http://c2.com/w4/wikibase/?LongListOfWikiClones

Quoted directly from: Schwartz, Linda, Sharon Clark, Mary Cossarin, and Jim Rudolph, "Educational Wikis: Features and Selection Criteria" International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 5, no. 1 (April 2004).

Wiki Selection Criteria

The following list outlines criteria for consideration when selecting a wiki for educational use. (These are consistent with the criteria adopted earlier in this Report series.)

Cost:
1. Open source software vs. financial outlay required
2. Licence fees (scaled per user)
3. Supportable programming language
Complexity:
1. Online technical support (documentation, manual, FAQs)
2. Plug-in or scripting exchange
3. Sandbox
4. User community
5. Web-hosted or download required
Control:
1. User registration
2. Password protection of core pages
3. Levels of user rights to edit
4. Active user list
5. Participants online
6. Easy to restore damaged or deleted pages
Clarity:
1. Index/ site map
2. Interwiki – format that facilitates linking content between different wikis; two common formats are are CamelCase, and [free links]
3. Back-linking
4. Page hierarchy
5. History of all versions (revision tracking)
6. Archiving of all pages
7. New page creation
8. Page deletion
9. New content identified (version compare)
10. Email notification of changes
Common Technical Framework (CTF):
1. Editable by anyone with a forms-compatible browser
2. Cross-platform
3. Internet and Intranet installation
4. Resolution of simultaneous editing conflicts
5. Plain ASCII text storage
Features:
1. Editable by major browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape)
2. WYSIWYG editing
3. HTML support
4. Text editing (italics, font size, colour)
5. Image insertion
6. Hyperlink insertion
7. Tables
8. Lists (numbered, bulleted, hierarchical)
9. Media insertion (streaming audio/ video)
10. Search
11. Spell-check
12. Emoticons
13. Blogging
14. Polling
15. Calendar
16. RSS
17. Link checking
18. Drawing tools
19. Equation editor
20. Synchronous text messaging