Wiki Evaluation

Question

Hi

I am in a process of evaluating wikis. Our main purpose is to use it for product documentation for customers and internal use like specifications etc.

I have started out with using the Wiki Matrix and have found that the following products suits our needs:

Confluence XWiki Clearspace MediaWiki DocuWiki

Is there anyone out there that have some experience with these wikis?

If you have any experience you would share I would be appreciate it,

thanks in advance

t

Answer 1

I've used DocuWiki and I wanted to take a (read-only) copy of the wiki on my laptop to a customer site. However, I couldn't find a way to easily export the wiki to a static set of HTML files. I think I ended up pulling a mirror copy with wget or something.

For my own personal wiki, I use ikiwiki which always generates static HTML files for the entire wiki. Also, you can set it up so it's backed by a proper revision control system (I've set it up with Git).

Answer 2

I have used MediaWiki a lot, and it has always been able to fulfill my requirements.

Answer 3

I'm running several instances of DokuWiki and have had no problems with them. Installation is trivial (no database required), ACLs provide fine-grained access control for reading and writing and versioning is as powerful as it is in MediaWiki.

Answer 4

I have a fair amount of experience with XWiki. We use it for internal documentation in our department. I have evaluated MediaWiki, Confluence, and DokuWiki.

XWiki

We decided to use XWiki because it is written in Java (we're a Java shop), it supports namespaces for the pages, and it has a WYSIWYG editor. We've encountered a few issues with it:

• If you enable the stats package to track statistics about what's going on with the Wiki, you might need to bump up the memory available to the JVM to at least 96 MB.

• The URLs are a bit longer than they need to be. They are actively working to shorten the URLs in the 1.7 release.

• The biggest problem we've had is with the WYSIWYG editor. It's just broken.

• The WYSIWYG editor stores changes to the page in HTML and wiki markup instead of representing everything as wiki markup.

• The WYSIWYG editor inserts lots of entity values into the page. For example, any time you type the number "1" onto a page, it gets stored as 1 in the markup.

• The WYSIWYG editor changes the layout during the editing cycle. For example, if you click preview to look at your changes, you might return to the edit screen to find a few extra carriage returns. People kept asking me, "Why do my paragraphs keep getting so far apart?"

• The XWiki docs can be a little hard to navigate, but it's getting better. I recommend the XWiki Forums over the mailing lists, but that's just me.

That said, I think XWiki has a lot of potential. The developers are aware of the busted WYSIWYG and have scheduled a new WYSIWYG engine for the 1.7 release. For now, you might want to disable WYSIWYG editing and just steer people towards using the wiki markup.

What our operations and engineering teams do is create their documents in Microsoft Word, save the doc as HTML, then just paste the HTML into the wiki page inside of {pre}...{/pre} tags. This causes XWiki to evaluate the HTML and ignore any wiki markup. The resulting pages end up looking almost identical to the Word docs they were derived from. It's a sucky way to do it for short pages or pages maintained by multiple authors, but it seems to work for them.

Some good things about XWiki:

• It allows comments on every page, and the comments are "pretty" compared to the MediaWiki talk pages.

• The attachment handling is pretty good in my opinion. Attaching a file to a page is just as easy as attaching a file to an email.

• It allows scripting using Velocity (and Groovy, I think.) This allows you to customize things if you want to, especially if you have a bunch of Java developers using the wiki. I have only made some very minor tweaks, but it's still cool.

The Others

If I had to do over, we might have gone with MediaWiki or Wikka Wiki instead of XWiki. Dokuwiki would probably have met our needs as well. (I don't like the DoikuWiki breadcrumbs, but that's a minor quibble.) We actually wanted to get a copy of Confluence, but we were denied approval for the license cost.

I have a lot of experience with MoinMoin and Wikka Wiki as well if you're interested.

Good luck!

Answer 5

Hi braveterry,

I hope you're still using XWiki. We've made a lot of progress with the XWiki Enterprise 1.9 releases (1.9.2 as of now):

• new working WYISWYG editor :)
• new rendering engine
• new syntax
• polyglot wiki
• office importer
• webdav support
• REST support

and more...