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).