Occasionally, I see a post that I have written as a reference in a white paper, a book, or somewhere else online.  I actually started CMSReport.com as a place for me to learn more about Web content management systems and information systems.  Whenever someone references CMS Report it signals that we have gone full circle where someone is also learning from me.  There is not a more awesome feeling than this.

One thing I have yet to achieve is being a legitimate reference at Wikipedia.  Until now!  CMS Report is being referenced on the wiki page for Frog CMS.

1. ^ "phpRadiant to imitate Radiant CMS" (2007-01-04). Retrieved on 2008-04-28.

For those that do not not know, phpRadiant was the original project name for this current Frog CMS.  Frog CMS was inspired by the Ruby on Rails application, Radiant CMS.   Naturally, after two years in development, the developers for Frog CMS have become inspired with their own roadmap for building this CMS.  Frog is currently available at version 0.9.5 from the Frog CMS download page.

A couple years ago we decided to use MediaWiki for a wiki implementation at work.  Wikipedia uses MediaWiki for their wiki application so we felt it was the right choice for our needs.  One concern my team had was that MediaWiki didn't come with a rich text editor (no WYSIWYG).

While a number of us may be fine with using wikitext or HTML to edit our wiki pages, I believe the majority in any organization prefers to edit their pages with a friendly user interface similar to that found on their word processor. At the time, we tried a number of solutions but found neither the suggested TinyMCE or FCKeditor implementation integrated that well with mediaWiki.   So for our project we settled with wikEd, an editor that still required users to work with wiki syntax but surprising a very good tool for most users.

During a lunch conversation last week with Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, I mentioned my frustrations with MediaWiki not having available a good WYSIWYG solution.  Deane suggested that I look at a more recent implementation of MediaWiki plus FCKeditor. This project is being supported by the developers of FCKeditor themselves.

But with the release of Wikiscanner we now find that organizations are actively trolling Wikipedia to help themselves, or to hurt others.   We find that our level of trust in Wikipedia has been significantly impugned.  We find that the social computing model is suspect to abuse from those who aren’t playing by the rules.  In effect, our naïve view of the world of wikis is destroyed.

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away—for free—all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites."

Complete Story

"The first timeI heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on?"

-Steve Fox, Editor in Chief, InfoWorld, September 4, 2006

 

As I was heading for bed, I just saw ABC's Nightline story on Wikipedia. Wikipedia uses the wiki application MediaWiki for its content management system. The Nightline story was as close to a fair and balance story on an IT subject you can find on a non-technical program. The story focused not so much on technology as it did the people of Wikipedia, mainly the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the community of wiki users.

The biggest challenge for the reporter was to explain to television viewers exactly how an open community such as those found on open source projects and wiki sites actually work together. How do 1.3 million articles get written by volunteers? Wales didn't seem to have an answer except to say that all he knows is that it just works.

"Nature ran an article last December where they compared Britannica and Wikipedia on certain scientific entries, and they found that the Britannica articles contained around three errors per article, and Wikipedia articles contained around four errors per article, so when we heard that, we were somewhat pleased, because at least it showed people that it's not completely insane," Wales said.

When I was watching the show all I could think was how do you explain the dynamics of open source communities to those who have never heard of such a thing? How would I explain what the community is all about when I don't think any of us can explain why it works. A very challenging task indeed and I'm glad Wales didn't have an answer...because I think it would have confused the average television viewer even more.