Crucial Thought

I wish DekiWiki had support for shared hosting customers.

I have heard it said that a blog is by nature a representation of one’s own life and personal interests. That said, you all probably know how interested I am in wikis. One of my more useful posts (judging by the ongoing interest) was my original post on wikis. It still seems to generate traffic. A recent comment by Aaron F of MindTouch recommends I take a look at DekiWiki. The comment reads like this…

Chris, you will definitely want to take a look at MindTouch?s DekiWiki (www.mindtouch.com or www.opengarden.org). It has the most sophisticated in browser WYSIWYG there is. It?s also open source. I am passionate about making knowledge easy to consume and accessible to everyone, which may be why I?m very enthusiastic about 1). education 2). open source. Let me know if there is anything I can help you with.

The trouble I am having with DekiWiki is that it is not readily installable for shared hosting customers, and not many teachers (let alone end users) will have root access which is necessary to make the changes required by the installation routine. A comment on this digg story pretty much sums up the frustration which reads like this..

Another wiki which requires so many prerequisites that it cannot be installed on shared hosting. Its fine to assume that everyone has complete control over their server, but it would be more realistic to try to reduce requirements to those that an average shared hoster can control. I understand that its hard to do great things without some additional libraries… but at the same time, its hard to get people to use your offerings if they can’t install them. (BTW, if you assume that the average business user has control over their internal server, you’d be wrong again).

Yes, I know they sell a wiki-in-a-box to solve this problem. So, I don’t expect to see them putting any effort into more reasonable requirements, but perhaps other devs can modify the code.

I am not sure that I would have looked into DekiWiki had it not been for the comment by Aaron on my blog. I felt that he deserved a response and that I should look into it to see if it had ramifications for the classroom. I think you deserve that.

Well when I first read the installation guide, I was struck by how “linuxy” it is. I was certain that even though I have SSH access enabled, they would not allow me to apt-get. I was also pretty sure they wouldn’t let me edit the php.ini file. Rightfully so! I wouldn’t let me edit it either!

So I was left with two options. Either I could 1) give up, or 2) install it locally on my linux box at home. I will probably do the latter some time, but for now I am sort of giving up. Unless I were a tech director who could make these decisions, DekiWiki doesn’t have the ease-of-installation necessary for educators. With Wikispaces offering free wikis that folks are snapping up, it is hard to justify anything that is not turnkey easy. Wetpaint also offers a solid wiki that kids find very easy to use. I don’t mind a complex installation, sometimes it’s worth it. In this case, I can’t make it work at all! I can’t even get past the download box!

A quick Google search turns up only a couple results, of which I comprise one third. This indicates either folks are giving up or there is not much of a market for education, or not enough interest. Again, I am only investigating this based on what Aaron said in the comments.

His comment also says “Let me know if there is anything I can help you with” so I wrote him an email (on the same day as the blog posting, December 06, 2006) with my concerns, asking if I had missed something. My email said exactly this, and this has not been edited.

I actually downloaded it recently, but one thing that will keep dekiwiki from the mainstream teacher arena is the installation instructions.

For example, if I want to install wordpress, I download it, create a mysql database, edit the config file, and then upload and maybe run an install script (can’t recall).

With dekiwiki, the instructions seem to be written for me as a server operator on debian as opposed to a shared hosting user, as are the teachers I know.

See the difference between that and some of the other options?

Did I miss a set of instructions geared toward the shared hosting user? I would happily take another look!

As of today, I have received no response. Needless to say I am disappointed.

There is a service called Viawiki that allows folks like us to sign up for a free Dekiwiki. I did so, because I wanted to try out their browser-based WYSIWYG editor. As you know, WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM editing is requisite for me. I will go into why in a later post, but I deal with 11 and 12 year-olds and I only have them for nine weeks so I can’t afford to teach wiki markup syntax.

I did sign up for a wiki on their wiki farm, and a cursory glance shows a strong wiki with quality editing features. I like it’s built in editor is quality. There are a lot of good features, but the free account is limited to 25 mb. Can that compare with other wikis that have no such restrictions, especially when other services are also ad-supported?

Aaron said he has a heart for education and open source, so I am willing to admit he was busy or otherwise occupied and unable to respond. If there were a version of DekiWiki open for shared hosting installation, I would install it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I suppose I will have to remain disappointed. I guess you might consider this a call for DekiWiki to help us educators out and show that “enthusiasm”? I ask genuinely, because I think this product has a lot of possibilities for education, it just needs to be as accessible as the information it will hold.