Customer Reviews

Wiki: Web Collaboration

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Wikis are an interesting experiment in collaborative effort on the Web. The best known example is of course Wikipedia. The authors cite this, but devote most of the text to explaining how to use MediaWiki and TWiki. Both have become popular for maintaining wikis, and are shown to be very easy to learn and use in a group effort.

Wikis have a notation all their own. But not too dissimilar to HTML, and just as easy to learn.

You can treat this book as a learner's manual for MediaWiki or TWiki. More generally, you might read it to see if your company or group should run its own Wiki, and the issues involved. The discussion is at a deeper technical level than elementary books on Wikis.

I manage a TWiki installation for a large media company and bought this book when I was first hired to get myself more familiar with the system. At first it wasn't very useful because it looks at very specific uses of TWiki. However, as I've begun to work with the system and create my own applications, it has been a very handy supplement to the somewhat skimpy documentation in TWiki itself. For example, the section on Search Strings revealed its value only at the point where I needed to learn more about regular expressions in order to create more complex content management tools. I also have found the included tools and full installation of TWiki to be of great use in providing me with a TWiki sandbox for experimentation. However, as someone with an extensive background in techncial writing, I sometimes find the information provided to be lacking in enough detail; the section on skins and templates, for example, is useful for describing the mechanics of FreeSkin and FlexibleSkin, but doesn't provide enough information on how to use or modify these skins, or the complexities of managing templates. If you are a TWiki admin, or someone interested in creating TWiki applications, I would recommend this as a useful supplement to the documenation included with TWiki.

I was expecting this book to be a guide on how to best design a Wiki for collaboration. Half the book is useless if you don't plan to use Twiki. With over 50 wiki's out there "what are the odds". I was very upset and returned the book. I felt ripped off for the price. If you are using Mediawiki, the first part of this book (Theory/Mediawiki) can easily be found on the internet.

Lots of details in this book. I sometimes found it hard to follow because I am just getting started working on wikis. URLs listed in the book led me to a website I could not read, it was all written in German.

I was looking for either some tips and tricks or a well-organized presentation of information from the trences. You know....something useful to make it worth the relatively high price; something detailed and tangible to help me implement and administer a wiki.

Instead, I found the book to be an awkwardly-flowing collection of what you can readily - and freely - find on the web. I did not find any value add.

If you want high-level stuff in one place and are not looking for details, it does provide a good overview of 3 wiki products and some philosophical musings.

By default, the information will be out of date. And - assuming you're working with one of the products (MediaWiki, TWiki, or Confluence), you might get some value from the approximately one-third of the book that deals with that particular product.

This is a compilation from multiple authors...and it shows.

Save your money for something more enjoyable or useful. You will generally find more current info that is just as - if not more - usable for free out on the web.