Issue: What is the difference between VaulWiki and MediaWiki?

In general, the learning curve that you experienced with VaultWiki will not be a unique experience. When using any wiki software in general, it can often be difficult to figure out the best way to build something, let alone learn what features are actually useful for what you want to build.

When you purchased VaultWiki, there was only the option to pay for a year at once. Since then we have added the option to pay 1 month at a time. The price is lower up-front ($10), but if you end up renewing monthly for an entire year, you would spend more by going on the new $10 plan.

While the basic ideas are similar between MediaWiki and VaultWiki (they are both wikis), there are many fundamental and significant differences. Here are a few:
- MediaWiki is not structured. You cannot define a structural hierarchy like forum users are used to. In this way, it's often difficult for first-time wiki users to understand how to build cohesion across pages.
- MediaWiki does not share the user logins, profiles, search results, or styles with your forum. Only VaultWiki does all of this.
- MediaWiki does not support building multi-page "Book" content.
- MediaWiki does not support inserting wiki content on non-wiki site pages.
- MediaWiki does not have tools for managing multilingual content or performing translations.
- Only VaultWiki supports auto-linking of wiki terms in either wiki or non-wiki content.
- MediaWiki does not support threaded discussion of wiki content.
- VaultWiki intends to be more of a social wiki than MediaWiki. In a social wiki, the users will interact with each other more, strengthening the community as well as your content.
- It's easier to create attachments in VaultWiki than in MediaWiki.
- MediaWiki is namespaced, which places limits on wiki content titles and what kind of content it can be based on its title. VaultWiki (4) does not have these limitations.
- VaultWiki offers more control over user permissions and moderated content.

Thanks! I will dive in again and try to learn how to set up and administer Vaultwiki for my classes I teach.

Where can I find documentation on how to set up a wiki? I am looking for best practices and standard setups to get started.

Dustin

I will see what I can find for you, but this should be good to help you get started:

Before launching any new web site or service, you should always test it personally or privately for a while so that you, as the admin, can get a handle on how everything works, and so that most problems that affect your implementation can be ironed out before you go live. This will ensure that everything goes smoothly later and that you can answer user inquiries with confidence later on. This isn't just limited to VaultWiki or wikis, but you should write a page or two explaining how your site should be used, and how to use it properly based on those rules.

So with VaultWiki, the first thing you want to set out to do is defining the structure of your wiki. If you want to draw a tree diagram on paper first, it may be helpful. Basically, you want to answer a few basic questions:

- How will your wiki be organized? Some people organize by type of content (images, regular pages, translations, etc), by theme (tragic, inspiring, historical), or by specifics (books by author X, GE refrigerators, dog breeds). To keep it simple, try to start with only 4 or 5 different containers. You can always add more later or reorganize, once you're more comfortable with the software.

- Do you want all areas to be fully editable by your users, or do you want to make some content only controlled by admins? There are ways to protect admin content from being edited, but some people like creating entirely separate areas for admins vs regular users -- for example, you may want to use some tools that you don't trust regular users with (like raw HTML).

Once you have an idea of how the wiki's basic organizational structure will look, you can go ahead and duplicate it in Structures > Area Manager in the VaultWiki Admin Panel.

Then you will want to setup your Usergroup Permissions. These are the global permissions for your users across your entire wiki, based on what usergroup they belong to. They will be the "default" settings for your user permissions.

If you want your users to have different rights in a specific wiki area, you can modify that by clicking the Keys next to the area's name in the area manager.

If you are making a multilingual wiki, make sure to create the languages you want to let users post in by visiting Languages > Language Manager in the VaultWiki Admin Panel.

After that, most best practices tend to relate to what you should put in a wiki page to make it considered "a good article". If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

How can I organize the wiki by projects? I am looking at the website for Wikispaces for Teachers. http://www.wikispaces.com/

This is a upgraded version of Wikispaces for teachers that is more of a social wiki and for doing project based learning.

This is what I want to do in Xenforo, but I am not sure if I can do it this way.

How can I set up projects and assign people to teams?

How can I assess the contributions of team members to a project?


Dustin

And can I change the names of projects/areas/containers? I am not sure what the project names will be yet, but I wanted to get started setting up the structure for the wiki. My class doesn't start for another month but I want to set up the wiki now. Do I need to have all of the names decided on now?

Dustin

I forgot to ask this question to be more specific. How can I set up wiki teams within Vaultwiki? Should I use social groups for this? What is the optimal way to manage wiki writer groups?

Dustin

I could be remembering wrong, but I thought you had a XenForo forum.

The optimal way to manage wiki writer groups is via user-groups. If you have a small forum and can create a few extra usergroups, then this is the best way. However, this might require you to organize your areas by team if you want to prevent different teams from modifying each other's work.

That is, instead of having different areas for different content, create a dedicated area that each team is allowed to create and edit content in. If you are doing something like having them create translations from a master collection of pages, then you can either protect the original pages in the collection or you can turn off editing permissions for the collection, but leave translating permissions turned on. If you have issues getting this working, just let me know.

VaultWiki's social groups integration is meant mainly as an enhancement of vBulletin's existing social groups feature. While it does allow "teams" to prevent others from modifying their work, I have always considered social groups to be a "beta" function.

And XenForo does not have social groups. We may eventually add a dedicated social group function that works under XenForo, but that is not on the menu for the near future.

If you are simply trying to keep track of the contributions of members of a specific team, keep in mind that you can use the Special:Contributions page to view the contributions for an individual user, and that you can use Special:MostContributions to see a ranking of all users' contributions.

In XenForo, you should also be able to create goals for individual users (like trophies, or rank increases), since you can use different kinds of wiki actions as user criteria. If you are curious about how to create trophies or something like that, I'm sure someone at XenForo would be eager to point you in the right direction. I have not done that myself.

xenforo usergroups are for permissions, not for organizing group projects. Vaultwiki does not seem to have functions for this yet. In vbulletin I use social groups which somewhat works. It would be very useful to have something similar in VW, so that groups of wiki writers can be assigned to a project.

I agree. This problem is also related to a data loss issue across imports: https://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/3526/

But resolving the "team" problem would require us to build a relatively in-depth groups/teams function for XenForo-only. We had the impression that the social groups integration in vBulletin had only been used by a small number of customers, so a high priority was not placed on resolving this discrepancy.

However, I now see how groups would be beneficial for a wiki beyond vBulletin's original scope for them, and beyond our original scope for the social group integration, which we thought would be used to make pages that were relevant to individual groups.

And I am aware that my suggestion for organizing the wiki above is not ideal and goes against the intent of both usergroups and wiki areas. But for XenForo it seems to be the best solution to the "team" problem at the current time.

Would it be an idea to first create a simple social group function by creating areas with area members?
And then for later expand this group function for optimal wiki writing project organization.

I use the Waidango social groups add on. I am not sure if that will be useful for the wiki or not.

My plan right now is to organize the wiki according to project and then assign particular people/roles to each project whereby they work as a team on that project.

Dustin