Assignment 1: Finding a Wiki for a Library

The public library that I formerly worked for, the South Georgia Regional Library system, is currently in the process of starting a wiki for patrons to find out information about title holdings, reference resources, and other information of patron interest as well as for hosting information of interest to staff such as training materials and Library Science related information and links. In order to make the decision about which wiki package that the library will use as the backbone of their wiki site, the library has asked for my opinion to help aid them in implementing their new wiki.

The library system serves a diverse population in a mixed urban and rural environment spread across three counties in southern Georgia and is part of the Georgia Public Library Service. The budget for the system is lower than the state and national average for libraries serving a population size in excess of 100,000 and anticipated funds for creating and maintaining a wiki are estimated to be low.

In order for the library’s wiki to better serve the interests of their patrons, staff, meet the library’s budget requirements, and be user-friendly for staff editing, the wiki must meet a few requirements: 1. The wiki must have a free and open-source backbone, 2. The wiki must be windows compatible, 3. The wiki must have a freely available community support base, 4. The wiki must have the ability for user interaction via comments, posts, etc., 5. The wiki must allow for a fully functioning calendar., 6. The wiki must allow rich media content in the form of images, video, etc. 7. The wiki must have the built-in capability for statistics gathering such as ranking content by popularity, etc., 8. The wiki must allow for HTML tagging and WYSIWYG editing., 9. The wiki must be able to filter SPAM and have security features., 10. The wiki must be user friendly!

Based on the libraries requirements and budget my suggestion would be to use the MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) platform. MediaWiki is a free software and open source wiki package geared towards education that is written in PHP and is the backbone of Wikipedia. This wiki package meets and exceeds all of the library’s designated requirements when comparing this package to other comparable packages found at http://www.wikimatrix.org/.

For more information about MediaWiki and Wikipedia check out this talk with Brian Vibber (known as Wikipedia's "only paid employee"):