Feb
3
(2006)
Tikiwiki as a “secure” wiki?
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: mediawiki, tikiwiki, wiki.
One of the biggest questions I get from people who want to use wiki.ucalgary.ca is “How do I protect or lock a page?” I’ve had to respond with a gentle suggestion that the wiki is an open resource by design, but that doesn’t go very far. There are valid reasons for locking down a wiki - ranging from sensitive information that shouldn’t be In The Wild, to protecting privacy (K-12 collaborations can’t have info about kids leaking onto the ‘net for obvious reasons).
It really felt counterproductive to just refer folks to other external tools like Writely. They’re great tools, but if wiki is to be a valued resource on campus, it should serve all core requirements. I’m struggling with the possibility of migrating away from MediaWiki (which doesn’t handle security, by design), or possibly adding a second “secure” wiki as an option.
I spent an hour or so this evening playing around with TikiWiki - some pretty fully-featured stuff (if a little “busy” as a result) that should solve any/all issues. I’ll keep playing with Tiki to get a better feel for it.
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9 Responses to “Tikiwiki as a “secure” wiki?”
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TikiWiki’s got some great features and a fairly easy (if nonintuitive) set of admin tools. It really is kind of ugly and un-sleek, but charming nonetheless. Steve Greenlaw used one for his Econ class and it seemed to work fine.
I prefer MediaWiki because a) it’s what Wikipedia uses and I can reinforce that connection subtly with newbies, b) I think it looks very nice, and c) I love the way its basic organization stresses composition and discussion on every new page. Admin is a bit of a pain, but I’ve been able to find the copy-and-paste code for localsettings.php every time I’ve needed it to lock the wiki down. I don’t know if there’s a batch entry provision for account creation, though, and that’s pretty important to scale this stuff.
Thanks for the pointer. I have been looking for a secure wiki to host as a collaboration tool for a while now. Media wiki just doesn’t cut it for a commercial environment. I will be installing it and trying it out.
Gardner, you’re preaching to the converted - I’ve been running wiki.ucalgary.ca for over a year on MediaWiki for the same reasons
I am going to plug dokuwiki which is very minimalistic to start out which and takes the add-on approach. It stores the data in text-files which are arranged in a hierarchical structure depending on the name space. If you want something that’s clean and produces data that is likely to be readable 10 years down the road, then dokuwiki is the way to go.
We are deploying TikiWiki as our campus knowledge base and are in the process of developing access and structure hierarchies so that the information can be “trusted.”
Obviously we are not use it in the conventional sense of a wiki and one of the reasons is that it was mandated that the information we put out there with our name on it had to be controlled either in terms of its content or its availability to certain audiences. For example, some of the information we have is available to our campus consitituents but not to the general public (such as commercial WebCT tutorials). Other information is primarily for the internal use of the staff at our HelpDesk and is not available for general consumption (due to access or privilege restrictions not available to those outside the HelpDesk for example).
We accomplished this by locking down branches of the tree and restricting it to certain user groups, such as the relatively small group (less than 50 students and staff) that are members of ITS. We are still working out some of the rough spots - specifically how to scale this to larger groups, i.e. all of our faculty, all of our students, just our graduate students.
I would love to run a side by side experiment where I could compare the trustworthiness and usability of an open wiki v. a closed wiki. But then again that would require time.
[...] I was following my feeds in SharpReader this morning when I came across this post by D’Arcy Norman at the University of Calgary: Tikiwiki as a “secure” wiki? D’Arcy is exploring the use of a locked-down TikiWiki installation to achieve an environment where the data is more secure. Philosophical arguments of the true nature of a wiki aside, this is something that we have been wrestling with at Plymouth State since last April. [...]
I’m not sure any wiki script is robust enough to serve as a campus-wide knowledge management system. TikiWiki has a good admin interface but I’d want something with much better documentation for the enterprise level. And may I offer one more plug for MediaWiki? For me, part of its value is the way it inspires me to reconceive what I want rather than shape the tool to what I’ve already decided I need.
We liked TikiWiki cos it does CAS (http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CAS/Home) which powers our single sign on, but it was definitely not an intuitive out-of-the-box experience for me either as an admin or as an end-user. Too many features. This is fixable, but it means someone spending a goodly amount of time doing configuration and possible skinning the thing. In the end it seemed as easy to me to write a CAS connector for another piece of Wiki software, either MediaWiki or PhPWiki (my own past experience definitely colours these choices). Seems like a strange complaint, but it was just one of those ‘eeeewww’ experiences when fiddling with it.
I would suggest you try the new feature "Workspaces" in tikiwiki 1.10 cvs. If using the stable branch (1.9.x), you can use the workspaces through the AulaWiki Mod (which includes the workspaces code), plus some more items for educational scenarios..
See more info. in http://edu.tikiwiki.org
Cheers
Xavi