WikiMatrix Allows Side-By-Side Wiki Comparison
Natali Del Conte
36 comments »
Like it or not, wikis are a dime a dozen these days. So when (and if) it comes time to choose one, WikiMatrix is a good place to start. It’s a site that allows you to compare any and all wikis on the market in a side-by-side grid.
WikiMatrix has over 100 wikis to compare. The wiki designers maintain the information on their listing because, as WikiMatrix founder Andreas Gohr puts it, “nobody knows a product better than its creator.”
WikiMatrix was launched about a year ago and Gohr says that it is popular enough within the wiki developer community that wiki owners are proactive about getting their sites listed. But he says that users’ knowledge of wikis usually doesn’t go much further than Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia. Others might have the need to have the wiki integrated into enterprise structures. There are various different use cases for wikis and various different engines and each does things a little bit different. If you decide to replace the Intranet of a 5,000+ employee company with a wiki you may need to compare different choices. That’s what WikiMatrix is for.”
Users can also create their ideal wiki on the site and then see which wiki comes the closest to matching their needs. Gohr’s 10-person company also launched ForumMatrix.org last year as a spin-off, which is basically the same site but for forum software, although Gohr admits it isn’t as popular as WikiMatrix yet.
when will TechCrunch become a wiki?
This seems quite interesting!
There’s actually a good number of similar matrix websites out there. In addition to the WIKI one, try cmsmatrix.org & podcatchermatrix.org. The podcatcher one looks very similar to the WIKI matrix, but all are nicely done. A google search for “matrix compare” brings up a number of others.
Sorry for the quick and messy response, currently at work, otherwise I would have “linkified” and, uh, “prettified” a bit before posting.
Cool!
Now, wiki makers don’t have to do a comparison themselves!?!
Like for example, does this nice comparison here: http://cyn.in/compare.aspx?r=d make sense any more?
Wawawiwa… is nice…
Now we need a site that ranks scales and compares mashups with wiki and other stuff.
Also think that they could have a better search method there, not only the guided one (which is not that bad BTW)
seems like a good website. But i’ll have to do more browsing around. Back to doc review
it’s cool..i really miss wiki..as it blocked again
Mike, there is a search besides the wizard: see http://www.wikimatrix.org/search.php
This feature will be added to http://forummatrix.org and http://podcatchermatrix.org soon.
what a bad idea
good job
WikiMatrix exists for over a year now and it’s getting better all the time: http://www.fredscapes.nl/2005/12/01.html#a486
I wish someone would do this for all of the PhotoSharing sites, VideoEditing sites, StartPage sites, etc. etc.
I’ve found that WikiMatrix is useless for my purposes. They catalog hundreds of features that I don’t care about. There isn’t any way to search on the things that matter:
* I couldn’t care less about Wikis written in .net or Java since I don’t have that in my web hosting environment
* It doesn’t give any indication about how easy software is to modify (just try changing the template in MediaWiki…)
* it doesn’t give any indication about the resource consumption of wikis (just try running MediaWiki in a shared hosting environment…)
* it doesn’t give any indication about how easy Wiki software is to use
In all MediaWiki suffers from a problem I call “the matrix” — it’s the idea that the state of a system is the direct product of the state of all the subsystems. Add another feature… Add another column to the table. The trouble is that 99% of the “facts” are irrelevant in a particularly situation.
The scariest thing about three mile island was that it took eight hours for the operators to understand what had gone wrong. The operators had thousands of strip charts, but no understanding — as you mention, WikiMatrix gets spammed by everyone who creates a wiki… I’d waste more time with irrelevant crap on WikiMatrix than if I’d typed “php wiki” into Google and decided to investigate the top five options.
I dunno about this one
That site looks cool
who uses this?
still not understand about this …blurr
Yes, all good points but I’m suffering in silence.
I’ve got chronic tinea. And it’s itchy! It started in my toes, but didn’t waste any time making its way to my crotch.
Bugger, sometimes it’s tough being a Kiwi!
What is more important to me is a ranking that shows # of users, # of developers, and price. From there I can pick the top 5 or 6 that I’d find more information about, and then do the comparison. Starting with the Wiki Matrix is just too confusing, with far too many choices.
What I’ve never understood is why there’s so many Wikis to begin with, particularly open source wikis. Why spend your time (without pay) on something that’s already being done 100X over? Particularly when many of the open source projects offer nothing new?
Not trying to bust on OSS, but I just hate to see projects that offer nothing unique (and LOVE the ones that are different).
I don’t see how anyone can get any real value from this site. When you compare even the crudest wikis with something sophisticated like MindTouch’s DekiWiki it just doesn’t tell you anything. Also, some of the categories their comparing by are simply asinine.
It is much like the opensourcecms site, without the hype.
this site is totally non reviewable ( not trying to be rude )
whose gonna compare something these days except for shopping ?
Not sure I would use this either.
I’m confused. Is this supposed to be new? I went to bookmark it with del.icio.us and found I’d already done so back in December 2005, apparently having found it via eHub. I thought TechCrunch had news that was new?
“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Andreas Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia.”
Wikipedia was not written to power an encyclopedia, MEDIAWIKI was.
This wikimatrix is great, for an overview, but when it comes down to it, you have to try the various wiki’s out to see which one truly suits your needs. I went through several wiki engine installations, before settling on Mediawiki for my site; http://www.wikistock.com . It may not be the prettiest, but it is the most robust and solid engine I tried. Nothing else was as stable.
very interesting website