What the wiki can do well
- Collaborative editing with version control
- Makes the information flow inclusive and participatory. People will feel a sense of ownership of their own pages if they update them themselves
- Math and LateX support is improving so it can be used for collaborative editing of articles
- contributions can be distributed in time
- Platform independent on client (i.e. you can use IE5 on Windows or Firefox on Linux) and server.
Limitations of the wiki
- Performance - The Wikipedia has a highly distributed architecture and has a database back-end (Moin does not)
As a consequence, moin has poor search functionality
- Limited support for offline access to information
- Calendaring and scheduling features are poor
Extra features required
- A centralised authentication system is needed so people can log in on various sites and from various locations. A Launchpad-type system provides central account control, including merging, adding and removing accounts.
- Requires either a fully open source system so patches can be added to all web components, or a pure Microsoft or pure Lotus Notes based system
- Robert thinks a soft integration with existing herald.ox.ac.uk user infrastructure will not be too difficult. All that's needed is (a) access to herald's authentication server and (b) a mapping of herald usernames to wikinames.
- Calendaring - Wiki's do provide some limited calendaring features, but this could be made much better with some additional code.
- more ...
RSS feeds for each page? -- HNO: this plug-in supports that. (now installed on this page, but is it working properly? needs testing)
- Cron jobs in association with calendaring?
Open questions
- How can user authentication be made to interopperate with existing systems?
