Jeremie Legault a écrit:

To whom it may concern,

As the IT Manager of the Canadian Council on Learning I was approached by a Director in our Organization interested in use a Wiki for the following project (please see his email below).

He was interested in http://wikigender.org/ that seemed to layout his mental picture for his project.

Yep, wikigender.org is based on mediawiki. http://www.mediawiki.org/

If possible I would like to discuss Wiki with someone who has used it, implemented and maintained in an effort to understand all that is involve with Wiki and what we can expect to

gain from it.

This is a bi

Thanks Jeremie Legault

---

Thanks again for this, Jeremie. At this moment, we are still just exploring the feasibility and whether a Wiki on e-learning would be a good vehicle to disseminate and, most importantly, to engage stakeholders and the users community in 'connecting' on this topic. One of the recommendations of the E-Learning (to be released probably before the summer) is to generate a momentum on e-learning in Canada, sharing of resources (including creating a clearing house on e-learning research and links). From what I can see, it occurred to me that a wiki may be a good way to start addressing such recommendation. In regards to populating the wiki, we may be able to ask our colleagues in (Montreal) to assist us in identifying relevant materials that the wiki could have before we lunch it publically.

So, I guess, at this moment, I am interested in finding out the cost implications from a system point of view (eg - is there a software or license costs ?

Mediawiki is GPL. There're no license costs. Mediawiki needs PHP (also free), a web server and a database. The most common choices are MySql and Apache, being both of them also free. So there is no required license cost.

server ? etc).

Well, you obviously need a server to do the work. The machine requeriments are highly dependant on the amount of traffic of your site. For better performance you could move the database to a different server and place another one with a caching proxy in front of the wiki. MediaWiki scales for sites with thousands of requests and using hundreds of servers (such as wikipedia) and also work for sites on a single server.

Also, from what I heard, there are public wikis and closed wikis where materials are being posted and reviewed by authorized assess only. Some organizations have both. I can also talk to as well to find out how successful those wikis are from a Communication point of view.

There're two aspects on how public a wiki is. It can be open for 'reading' and for 'writing'. You can restrict mediawiki for being edited only by a few people while allowing anyone to read it. You can also restrict editing to those people _for some pages_. The other option is restricting for viewing. The only official method for restricting viewing is to restrict viewing of the whole site (some extensions allow for more fine grained control but could not be complete, and thus leak 'private' data).

So, overall, my 'vision' is that CCL could be the 'catalyst' to get it started but then we will need to find out how could maintain it later once it is up and running (we may ask for example).

Mediawiki maintenance comes from the changes done by anonymous users (or just perform a registration). If you're restricting editing to known people, you won't need anything on this regard. On the other hanf, if anyone can change [some pages of] the wiki, you will get vandalism, spammers, spambots... They are easy to deal and can be done by just one person reviewing the changes daily *but* a 'place and forget' approach won't work.

Software updates are also straight forward. You can subscribe to the mediawiki-announce list to get informed of new releases (they are also sent to this one).