Wiki advice

mynamesnotdave

hi,

I've been asked to find some suitable wiki software for a university site I'm working on, and I thought someone on this forum is bound to be an expert.

Now, although there is a lot of wiki applications out there, we need something that matches all of the following criterea:

* No knowledge of or learning of any kind of mark-up language is needed.
(The students and staff simply won't use it if they have to learn anything first)

* Free - non commercial

* Full administrator system to allows to add and block users etc.


The problem with most wiki is that you have to learn a very simply mark-up language to use and this will put most people off.
Thanks for you help.
Tom

irnbru_2

mynamesnotdave wrote:

The problem with most wiki is that you have to learn a very simply mark-up language to use and this will put most people off.

... but that's how wikis work.

What problem are you actually trying to solve?

mynamesnotdave

irnbru wrote:

... but that's how wikis work.

What problem are you actually trying to solve?

I tried to explain this to my boss too, but I thought there might be an extremely easy to use one out there that guided you through everything.

Basically this is the problem:

We have a number of students on an exchange program.
We want somewhere where they can leave information (food, places to stay, doctor information, where to meet people etc) about each university in the exchange program.
We would have a rough structure to the subject categories but we want the students to be able to login and edit/contribute/create notes for future students to read.
This way a guide would "evolve" from students who are actually at the universities in the exchange and it would be a very useful tool.
A wiki would be perfect for this, but my bosses concern is about getting them to use it.

LULUBELLE_2

Why not start an MSN Group - the info would stay there for ever and you could make it private, so it was only accessible by members? You could just have a thread for each Uni or subject. You would need to have a quantity of managers, to let the people in when they apply - you are notified by e-mail of applications to join.

http://groups.msn.com/login_info.msnw?referer=create&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fgroups%2Emsn%2Ecom%2Fcreatecomm%5Fpage1%2Emsnw%3F

mynamesnotdave

LULUBELLE wrote:

Why not start an MSN Group - the info would stay there for ever and you could make it private, so it was only accessible by members? You could just have a thread for each Uni or subject. You would need to have a quantity of managers, to let the people in when they apply - you are notified by e-mail of applications to join.

http://groups.msn.com/login_info.msnw?referer=create&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fgroups%2Emsn%2Ecom%2Fcreatecomm%5Fpage1%2Emsnw%3F

Thanks, but the university can be a bit anal and wouldn't allow linking to an msn group unfortunately.
It has to be none commercial.

Bob63

Mediawiki is very cool, non commercial and has shed loads of extensions to make it even more useful. I am in the process of migrating a ton of information off traditional web servers at work onto our internal Mediawiki implementation.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Mike

mynamesnotdave

cheesy.mike wrote:

Mediawiki is very cool, non commercial and has shed loads of extensions to make it even more useful. I am in the process of migrating a ton of information off traditional web servers at work onto our internal Mediawiki implementation.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Mike

Thanks,
I've been a doing a bit more work and been installing a few wikis on some server space I bought and what I need is a WYSISYG Wiki so will take a look at this now.
Cheers