Re: CMS vs. Wiki

Thanks, Seth!
I was contemplating the collaborative aspect for our purposes and 
appreciate your pointers.  We need to manage a number of records in a 
database for which I would like a web interface.  Is there a place with 
information on how to choose a CMS like there is for Wikis at, e.g., 
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChoosingaWiki ?
Thanks again!
Dierk

Seth Gottlieb wrote:
> 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!
-- 
Cheerio,
Dierk Seeburg, +1-602-953-4496, dierk_seeburg-E0T7EY2UX4gpIyhaTEd/[email protected]
Web Content Administrator, Choice Hotels International
http://www.choicehotels.com - http://www.choicecentral.com