With apologies in advance to James Agee, I begin by declaring to all here assembled, “Let us now praise famous wikis.”

And none has been more deserving of regard and praise than MediaWiki, the venerable open-source wiki publishing platform, originally written for and most popularly associated with Wikipedia. LSNC has relied on MediaWiki since 2006 as its principal publishing platform for its private intranet and some public web content, most notably its deservedly popular CalWORKs (TANF) guides and related resources.

But a lot has happened in the world of webware since 2006, much less 2001. In the last few years LSNC has also experimented extensively with the rapidly evolving WordPress web publishing platform, which experience has taught us is a vastly superior choice for web publishing, including collaborative and multi-author publishing. And the final nail in the MediaWiki coffin, for us, is the emergence of Google Sites, part of the Google Apps platform that LSNC has been using for the last several years. (And love. Really, really love.) Prompted in part by the work being done at The Findability Project, which directly impacts how we, as a large, widely dispersed non-profit organization, handle shared content, LSNC is now moving its intranet content that has long been published via MediaWiki to Google Sites, which is not yet optimally but still effectively integrated into our other Google Apps. And all our public web content at LSNC’s varied websites is now being purposely moved over to the WordPress platform, if it has not been done already.

What is our rationale for the shift away from MediaWiki to WordPress as our public face and Google Sites as our private face? Consider the following:

• Both MediaWiki and WordPress are relatively easy to install and configure, assuming one has the server side of things already in order. It is not a deal-breaker, but I would give a tip o’ the hat to WordPress for its five-minute install. (If you know how to do it already, it is more like 90 seconds or less.)
• It is not just that WordPress is also open source and free and PHP based. Having worked with both MediaWiki and WordPress, it is WordPress that has the larger, more enthused and arguably more talented development and support community. If you think not, than I assume you are not familiar with the remarkable, really remarkable WordPress Codex or the astounding level of WordPress plugins, among other things.
• I am pained to say this, as an early supporter of the use of wikis within the legal services community and someone who promoted MediaWiki whenever I had the opportunity to do so … but wiki syntax is a total bust — at least from the non-geek user side, exactly the persons it was intended to help create web pages without knowing HTML. Neither wiki syntax nor HTML (structural markup) can claim to be intuitive. They’re not. But as someone who has worked a lot with both wiki syntax and structural markup, and watched others struggle with creating and editing pages in MediaWiki, here is my conclusion: HTML is actually simpler, easier and undeniably more flexible! Hey, that’s me. Your mileage may differ. (Hey, there’s a reason why wiki platforms like Google Sites use a WYSYSIG interface and avoid using wiki syntax, but do provide access to the underlying HTML.)
• Edit a page in MediaWiki and one can see the seeds of failure within the wiki syntax model: An editing toolbar that in part apes what one associates with a word processing program. OK. But even with that option, our institutional experience is that non-geek content editors never really got the hang of things, such that one of the resident geeks had to go in and clean things up.
• Take a look at a current-version WordPress or Google Sites editing toolbar and the advantages from the user side reveal themselves. Really. Take a look at how editing works with those two platforms. Can you say, “zero learning curve”? (See “wiki syntax,” above.)
• Google Sites is tied in nicely with the basic complement of Google Apps services (Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs) that come with the free non-profit package that a lot of legal services field programs have adopted. It makes it very practical for the organization to rely on Google Sites as its intranet and put its users one-click away from other Google Apps they use everyday, or any other purpose the organization wants to put it to. For example, LSNC is currently experimenting with Google Sites as a special project repository for major impact cases. Here’s an example:



• From a web designer view of things, WordPress is a now a glorious model of PHP and dynamically generated HTML. Don’t take my word for it. Ask what Jeff Zeldman thinks. (Full disclosure: Happy Cog is his design studio, and the new style and design look of WordPress 2.5+ has his fingerprints all over it. But that’s a good thing.) MediaWiki? A singularly big pain in the ass to redesign. MediaWiki out-of-the-box pages validate well enough, but the markup approach is … oh, don’t get me started.
• But you’re thinking, “Hey, MediaWiki is a true wiki and it saves all the prior versions of the pages you create and change, so you can do the big roll-back, if needed. Yeah, how about that Mister Wiki SmartyPants Webdog, huh?” The answer is that among its many virtues and features, WordPress now supports post and page “revisions”: Install Google Gears, click on the Turbo link in the admin panel, and you’ve got all the roll-back you’ll ever need.
• Google Sites. Hmmm. Google is famous for its non-standards-compliant markup and there is not a whole lot one can do to unilaterally change the design of pages, other than the customization options built into the Google Sites app. But the built-in stuff is pretty good, actually, and offers enough flexibility that one can add a reasonable number of personal touches to any given site.
• Google Sites has the usual complement of wiki features, including an array of different types of page templates (“web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list”)
• From within Google Sites, the integrated search functions can locate any text anywhere within the site including any files you upload to a given subsite within Google Sites. And you can integrate Google Analytics. And you can target a Google Search Appliance at it as well. It is all Google good, so to speak.
• Did I mention that Google Sites is integrated into Google Apps?

In summary, let us honor MediaWiki. It taught us the wisdom of the wiki and introduced us to the concept of shared, collaborative publishing on the Web. And for us, that has now largely been better realized by WordPress and Google Sites.