Wikka Developer Blog

Wikka is now available in Softaculous, an auto-installer that powers the most popular control panels.

Here is the full list of installers and third-party distributions for WikkaWiki.

I recently blogged at AcademicProductivity.com on the benefits of using an invisible wiki to power one’s personal homepage. If this sounds like a shameless plug for WikkaWiki, it is. The full tutorial can be found on this page. I also created a short screencast showcasing how a wiki makes it easy to perform three simple tasks. Soundtrack courtesy of Piero Umiliani (1968). Enjoy

As some of you know, I have been working in the last months on a new Web service called WikiTracer designed to provide visual analytics and comparative statistics for wiki-based communities.

We think this service may be of interest to a broad range of users, i.e.:

• wiki owners, who will be able to understand more about their wiki by monitoring its growth and potential problems
• wiki developers, who will be able to assess the adoption of their product and the popularity of specific versions
• wiki practitioners, who will obtain valuable insights into the performance of a wiki and to build best practices to spur wiki adoption against quantitative analyses
• wiki researchers, who will be able to use the data produced by this service to perform large-scale studies on the evolution of wiki-based comunities

For a rationale on the usefulness of these statistics to study the evolution of wikis, you can read this paper.

The project is in alpha stage and WT plugins are currently available for WikkaWiki and DokuWiki, while support for other engines is still under development. We are looking for wikis with a fairly large user population and significant daily activity to join as alpha testers: by joining the WT tester community, your wiki will be polled on a daily basis to allow WikiTracer to collect a number of statistics on its content and population. No privacy-sensitive information is extracted, the list of indicators used by WikiTracer can be found on the WT data format specification page.

We are planning to run the test phase until early April 2009 to be able to collect sufficient data to implement the visualization tools.
If you are interested in joining (or helping develop plugins for other engines), please drop us a line at info [at] wikitracer [dot] com. To learn more about WikiTracer, you can visit its documentation wiki or pop in its IRC channel on freenode.