I recently received an email from pbwiki (PeanutButterWiki), offering to double the storage space of my pbwiki if I wrote about my pbwiki “anywhere online”. This sort of offer is quite new to me (i.e. I have never received anything like it before!), but I can see how it’s an interesting way to get people talking about your product/service. It’s quite a bold move – imagine if the majority of your users bagged your product, instead of saying positive things, which is presumably the point of such a request. (Apart from this email request, and the fact that I have a free wiki hosted by pbwiki, I have no other links or commercial ties with pbwiki. This is not an endorsement of pbwiki, but a record of my impressions to date of the product and service provided.) 
My poor pbwiki, Colloquy, has been sadly neglected of late. I’ve just been so busy with so many other things at work that it’s slipped down the list of priorities a bit. Ironically one of the projects that has been taking up a lot of my work time is a wiki – but one using MediaWiki. So I am pleased to be able to compare two different wiki packages. Pbwiki will be pleased to know that I am going to give pbwiki a high score – it is so much easier for an ordinary user to play with and learn how to use than MediaWiki is. I consider myself a novice user of wikis, and pbwiki was a breeze to work out.
Installation: I can’t really compare the set up of MediaWiki and pbwiki, because I had support from one of my IT colleagues at work with MediaWiki (she did it all); and pbwiki, being a web-based service, had all the usual simple sign-up procedures to follow.
Set up: By this I mean just deciding on a few pages and a layout and putting together some way for a user to navigate. Pbwiki was very easy to use in this respect. With MediaWiki I didn’t even have the correct permissions to modify the navigation links. To be fair this inability to modify the links was not a MediaWiki issue, but more due to my lowly status. However pbwiki still scores highly here because I could instantly see how to make modifications to my layout and so forth, whereas I had to go through several pages of the MediaWiki online manual and scrutinise these very carefully before working out that I didn’t have the access rights to make the changes I wanted.
Formatting: Again pbwiki wins. I don’t think the formatting is that different between both wikis, but pbwiki’s instructions were so much easier to find and follow that learning how to do anything was easy and painless. MediaWiki has lots and lots of instructions but these are more difficult to follow (partly because there are so many of them!). MediaWiki definitely shows its origins as a user-directed project – so many hands adding to it have meant that it is unwieldy and difficult for a newbie to navigate.
If I had to choose between MediaWiki and pbwiki to introduce the whole wiki ‘thing’ to people who have never used wikis before, I think pbwiki would be the better choice. If you have never used a wiki before and are curious to learn how they work and how to edit them, pbwiki is definitely worth trying. To date I have found it so much easier and less daunting to use than MediaWiki.
To be fair, both wikis have different origins – MediaWiki as an open source project, pbwiki as a commercial offering – and when I have used both wikis more my opinion may change (e.g. which is more customisable?). I’ll let you what I find out, and if my opinion does change. In the meantime I will continue to use both and enjoy learning all about wikis.
One Comment
Hmmm… interesting. But as usual, i don’t think i’d have the time. I struggle as it is to keep up with regular blog posts.