Finding the Best-Fit Wiki

Choosing a Wiki for My Library:

Characteristics

My library system, the Clayton County Library System,  is a public library system that is made up of 6 branches.  The library serves an extremely diverse population of 259,424 people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010), with Spanish and Vietnamese being spoken by many people who come to the branch libraries.  My library system has a total operating income of $3,523,460 (Public Libraries Survey, 2009).  The goal of the wiki would be to engage the patrons of the library and to allow them to have an active voice in the happenings there.

Library Requirements

The library would require a free wiki, and one that was very easy to contribute to and edit (WYSIWYG).  It would need to be hosted remotely to avoid local server problems, and be linked easily to the library’s web page.  Due to the diversity of the system’s community, a wiki that has at least the capability to be used in different languages would be preferable(at the very least, Spanish).

Wiki Selection

The Wiki Wizard narrowed the choice down for me nicely:  to four possibilities.  They are:  Confluence, MindTouch, Wikispaces and Zoho Wiki.  At first I was impressed with how many languages some of the wikis made available, but the audience some of them were aiming for just didn’t match our library patrons.  None of these seemed to offer Vietnamese, either, which is a language many of our patrons speak in the home.  When looking at the overall picture, Wikispaces is the best fit.  If MindTouch didn’t seem to be focused on users with more of a technical background, it would probably be a great fit for my library system.  Zoho Wiki had so many languages available, but seemed to only be for a smaller group (3 users, 3 workstations).  For at least a jumping off point, Wikispaces seems to be the way for my library to go.