This public web service of openpolitics.ca itself runs on wiki software, in particular, tikiwiki, a wiki engine that makes it possible for multiple, self selecting web page viewers to edit a page. See tikiwiki-based service for more detail.

comparing

A comparison of wiki software from Wikipedia and another more succinct and clear from Consumerium based on technical features tends to favour tikiwiki. This is misleading for at least three reasons:

1. It's the wiki data that counts, not the software. A large corpus? in wikitext or Microsoft Office? format will make it quite difficult or expensive to shift to any but totally data-compatible software.

2. Most wikis are free software and accordingly suffer from an ideology that over-estimates its usefulness. For propaganda from the zealots of each techology see:

• tikiwiki.org for tikiwiki
• mediawiki - from wikimedia.org for mediawiki
• twiki.org - for twiki?
• socialtext.com announced miki, a wiki optimized for worn devices.

[+] proprietary non-options

viable proprietary software

The more specialized Macromedia Contribute, and Office Live may become popular but do not take standard wikitext files - though there have been efforts to make Office XML? easily exchangeable/compatible with wikitext XML?.

to do

List comparative analyses of wiki software here, and other commentary relevant to choice of such software in the context of the open politics web

• tikiwiki
  • critical point of view at tikiwiki flaw
  • sympathetic point of view at tikiwiki-based service
• mediawiki
  • Wikipedia and Wikimedia's iron grip on it
  • mediawiki-based service
• software comparisons at wiki.creativecommons.org

• critical wiki software features
  • GFDL corpus namespace
  • wikitext standard
  • live XML import and RSS

• application-driven requirements
  • political wiki
  • large public wiki
  • intranet, e.g. Living Agenda
  • political party wiki, e.g. Living Platform