Wiki vs WordPress

As part of the Mpumalanga Civic Media Initiative (MCMI), our funders Code for Africa and GIZ requested Open Data Durban to train journalists from various newsrooms to use data tools to improve their quality of reporting on issues such governance and accountability. We initially started creating “how-to” documents for each tool describing in depth step by step instructions to use the tool. We then started creating instructional videos for each tool. With all this learning content now available, we needed to make it easily accessible to the public. The idea of the Data Tools website was then born. After much thought, we decided to implement either a Wiki or WordPress site. Here are some of my experiences.

Requirements and Users

Requirements: A web platform which is easy to setup, use, collaborate, share ideas and thoughts for the Open Data Durban community specifically for creating and sharing of Civic Tech Guides.

Users: Non-technical members from the team to update and create guides. General users collaborating, editing posts and commenting.

Introduction to the Platforms

The first question that came to mind was: Do we need a Wiki? And if not: what other platforms will meet our requirements?

So what are these two very familiar and popular platforms?

A wiki is a website that provides collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser.

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) which you can use to create a beautiful website, blog or app.

Hosting Setup for testing:

MediaWiki and Wikia software were explored for setting up the wiki pages with the final consensus being MediaWiki. The setup for both platforms was done on Amazon EC2 free tier services, both were easily hosted within minutes and ready for testing.

Both platforms are well supported online, however, the WordPress community is by far larger than MediaWiki.

My thoughts after testing both platforms:

The major disadvantage I found with MediaWiki over WordPress was the Wiki Markup, which is basically a set of syntax and keywords that are needed to format a Wiki page. While it is easy to contribute and edit a Wiki page, creating one using this Markup proved unintuitive and unnecessarily complicated. WordPress, on the other hand, has a typical word editor interface which users will be familiar with.

In the report to testing I wrote “It depends entirely on where we are heading or what we need from this guide/collaboration site, MediaWiki is a powerful medium with a lot of flexibility on editing and collaboration as is WordPress. Personally, it could go either way, styling MediaWiki would require a decent chunk of time but at the end, it is a wiki and generally users will have experience with interacting with it and possibly even editing it.”

Conclusion and the chosen one:

When I started the research I thought Wiki software was the way to go. However, for our requirements, a WordPress site Styled like a Wiki turned out to be the best option. It brought together the simplicity of a Wiki page with an easy to use and intuitive WordPress posting backend. While Wiki may not have been perfect for our requirements it was still extremely valuable learning how Wiki pages and Wiki software works.

– Wasim

Wasim Moosa is a Software Developer at Open Data Durban, a tea drinker and a lover of code.

Originally published at Open Data Durban.