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.
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:
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.
List comparative analyses of wiki software here, and other commentary relevant to choice of such software in the context of the open politics web
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
- mediawiki
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia's iron grip on it
- mediawiki-based service
- software comparisons at wiki.creativecommons.org
- critical wiki software features
- application-driven requirements