Re: CMS vs. Wiki

Hi Dierk,

In general, Wiki's are more appropriate for collaborative content 
management with little or no need for editorial control.  Web CMS are 
better for situations where you want to have an editorial process that 
controls what goes on the site.   Here are some questions that might 
steer you to one or the other.

Which is worse, having something wrong appear on the site (like a typo 
or incorrect information) or discouraging/impeding someone from 
publishing an idea or some information that has the potential to help 
others?  If the goal is to harness the creativitiy and knowledge from as 
many people as possible,  a Wiki might be the right tool.

Is there any need for workflow?  Wiki's generally do not have workflow 
or even an approval mechanism.  Once a user makes an edit, it is live.

Do you trust your users to manage the content?  Or, said another way, 
are your users motivated to improving the quality of the resource?  If 
so, go Wiki.

Is your organization engaged in a taxonomy initiative to organize 
content?  If so, a traditional CMS model might be preferable because you 
can delegate an authority to organize and tag content according to the 
corporate taxonomy.  The organiziation of a Wiki is totally organic.  
People create pages, people notice redundencies, people merge pages.  It 
is a chaotic process that eventually gravitates towards order (or doesn't).

Do you intend to reuse conent in an automated way?  Content in Wiki's is 
totally unstructured and, therefore, difficult to reuse in other 
applications.   Many web CMS have structured content (including 
metadata) that allows assets to be used by different sites in different 
ways.

I realize that you can solve a lot of these problems with some simple 
access control, but I believe it is best to choose a technology for what 
it was designed for.

So here are some examples of good Wiki's
* Wikipedia is able to harness the knowledge of thousands of readers 
with a common goal of sharing information.
* Open Source Software documentation.   Most Apache projects have a Wiki 
where project contributors can quickly and easily add documentation 
about the project.  The ease of contribution is one less excuse for a 
programmer to procrastinate documentation!
* My company uses a Wiki for an internal knowledge base and also a 
collaborative workspace on projects (however, we need to take the text 
from deliverables and port them into professional looking documents).

Here are somethings that would be better served with a traditional CMS
* Your corporate website.
* A policy manual.  While I would not be worried about people tampering 
with it because their is an audit history, someone might with good 
intentions add information that he thought was correct and temporarily 
mislead another reader.  Plus, you might want to transform the online 
version into a print version and that might be hard with a Wiki.



 





Dierk Seeburg wrote:

> Hi,
> I'd be interested in people's opinion on when to use a CMS and when to 
> use a Wiki?  For what tasks would you use or not use one and not the 
> other?  What are advantages of one over the other?
> Thanks a bunch!