On 25/01/2008, Cindy Livengood cmlivengood@gmail.com wrote:
Dear List Members,
I'm new to this list and new to the wiki admin stuff. I need to start a wiki for my school. I'm not a programmer, but I will learn anything I a need to learn.
I need it for both the public use and intra-organizational use of the district I teach in, so some things will require a user log-in and others won't.
I have noticed there are several places to download wiki from, but I need to know what would be the best package to download that would be the easiest for me to set up with minimal programming requirements.
Any URLs and advice you can offer a newbie would be greatly appreciated.
Do you really expect anyone to suggest anything other than Mediawiki on the Mediawiki mailing list? ;)
The only wiki I have any experience of running (as opposed to just using) is Mediawiki, so I can't say if any others might be easier. You say you aren't a programmer, do you at least have experience of running websites? If not, I would suggest you learn with a simple website before trying anything as complicated as a wiki (while it's all going well, you shouldn't need much knowledge of websites, but things will go wrong eventually and you'll need to know what you're doing to fix it - especially as it's a work thing, not just for fun). If you know how to run a website, just not how to program, you should be able to cope with Mediawiki, as long as you don't want to do anything non-standard.
One thing I would suggest - don't try and use one wiki split between public and private use, Mediawiki certainly isn't set up to work like that (you can do it, but it isn't easy or reliable), and I doubt any other wikis are either. You would be much better off running two separate wikis - with Mediawiki you can set up interwiki links which make it extremely easy to link between the two (in the same way Wikipedia links between different languages). Then you can have one wiki public and one private, which is pretty easy to set up.
All the information you should need to set up Mediawiki is available at www.mediawiki.org