Thursday, October 4, 2007

Is There Such a Thing As A Better Wiki?

WikiMatrix can be used to determine what kind of wiki best suits your needs. They have a cool Choice Wizard that will narrow down the field of available wikis to "free" and "WYSIWYG" (pronounced wizzywig, means What You See Is What You Get). Also allows you to choose the kinds of features you want. Instead of handing in a standard presentation for one of my grad classes, I'm gonna make a wiki instead. I've been irritated by wikispaces lately, mostly because it's not very seamless, lots of glitches. So, I thought I'd try out some other services. I made new wikis on the following sites:
http://atwiki.com/
- Luminotes
- Scribblewiki
- Seedwiki
- Stikipad
- Wetpaint
I have to be honest, there were other choices, but I went with these because I liked the names. There were some other choices like CentralDesktop, Netcipia and Cospire but I didn't think I'd remember those urls!

End results: I liked Wetpaint's "theme" choices. They look less like a wiki and more like a Web site, but their ads were just too prominent and the resulting page was overly busy. Seedwiki, @wiki, Scribblewiki and Stikipad had the same ease of use issues as wikispaces. Luminotes didn't appear to be operational at all. After all that, I didn't really come across any wikis that I thought offered a better service. Have any of you found a better wiki?

6 comments:

Dominick Bellizzi said...

I'm sorry you were having issues with Wikispaces. It's our highest priority to make the service as easy to use as possible, so we take it very seriously when someone has a less than perfect experience. Is there something specific that caused you trouble, or did something behave differently than you expected it to?

Dom from Wikispaces

Anonymous said...

Hi
There are lots of free hosted wikis out there.
One that is similar to wikispaces is PBwiki. It has been around for a long time and is popular with educators.
Mark

Alecia Berman-Dry said...

Hi Dom and thanks for the follow up. When I insert a table into the wikispaces browser, the "size table" function (drop and drag the size of the columns) does not work. Also, when I try to insert a photo and then size it, I cannot do so. It should be sizeable onscreen, no?

Alecia Berman-Dry said...

Thanks for the heads-up on PBwiki, Mark. I did know about that one and forgot to mention it on my list. I know that some great wikis are being hosted by PBWiki.

Unknown said...

I personally apologize for Luminotes not working for you. If you let me know what went wrong, I'd be happy to have a look at the problems and fix them. Presently Luminotes is still in beta, but I'll be launching 1.0 very soon.

Dan, Luminotes developer

Scott said...

Luminotes has been working nicely for me. I can understand your frustration, but give it a try now. Once you see how fast it is (there are no Edit and Save buttons -- you just start editing), other wikis will feel slow.

Scott