Goofed Home

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nocturnal.garden/post/552459

For a hobby of mine, there’s an outdated lore wiki on Fandom. I dislike Fandom and would like to host an alternative. It’s supposed to be accessible to all kinds of people.

I started with mediawiki as that’s what Fandom and Wikipedia are using, so people would be familiar with page structures at least and maybe the editor.

It turned out to be a bit of a pain though. It only has unofficial container images, the documentation is outdated and (what I consider as) core functionality like WYSIWYG editor or simple infoboxes has to be added by extensions or templates. I’m in the process of setting it all up and wondering if it’s worth it (and if I want to maintain it). There’s so many wiki projects it’s hard to keep track, what are y’all using for stuff that’s used by larger communities and simple to use with close-to-default settings?

Not at all! I did poke around some random pages after you helped me, sorry I didn’t come back to my. Thanks for sharing the update, I’m keen to see how you’re using DW.

Judging by how productive I’ve been just in the last 8 hours, I’d say going from Mediawiki to Dokuwiki was a good choice. I’m not even sure why. DW still uses markup instead of a WYSIWYG editor, which I’m fine with. I think it’s the namespaces. MW does have them, but you have to set them up with a config file on the server, and adding and removing them cannot be done lightly. With DW it’s as easy as searching for new_namespace:some_new_article, and the namespace is created along with the article. So I have a scratchpad namespace where I can work on drafts, a stories namespace to put my attempts at creative writing, a lore namespace for, well, canonized lore tidbits, and so on. And I don’t need to worry about names colliding like I did with MW where lore articles and story titles often conflicted.

DW lets you use hierarchy when it works, and loose categories (tags) when it doesn’t (with the tags plugin that is). With MW you just have categories but no hierarchy. Bookstack is the opposite. It forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. It does have tags, too, but you can’t have pages outside of books, and the pages have an explicit order. You can fairly easily change that order, but it’s always there.

Back to DokuWiki, the blog plugin has proven invaluable over the last few days. I can jot down ideas as blog entries and push them to the main lore namespace if I think they’re worth keeping.

I know wikis have been discussed here before, but I wanted to add my two cents after shopping around for a wiki at work and for personal use.

Obsidian

Pros

• plain text storage format
• great at gathering disorganized thoughts without imposing a rigid structure

Cons

• closed source
• many features that arguably define a wiki are either absent or paywalled, like easy sharing, collaboration, and versioning

Mediawiki

Pros

• it’s the wiki. Everyone’s used and possibly edited a Wikipedia page.
• version history
• close to Obsidian in terms of “write now, organize later”
• Probably the nicest-looking FOSS wiki platform out of the box
• a lot of the features that Obsidian paywalls are built in, like multi user support and version history

Cons

• Articles not stored in plain text
• Has its own markup. Granted Mediawiki predates Markdown but the table syntax is horrendous. The Mediawiki help page on the matter actually tries to dissuade you from using tables and notes that the markup is ugly.
• Extensions are annoying to install
• Absolutely zero access control. You can even edit other people’s user pages. There’s no way to hide sections of a wiki from the public or from particular groups of users.
• It tries to be all things to everyone. While this makes it versatile, it also means doing a particular thing probably requires knowledge of CSS or Mediawiki’s own templeting syntax. Sometimes I just want to have an info box that doesn’t clutter the source code of a page.

Dokuwiki

Pros

• Access control finally!
• Plain text files
• Easy to create namespaces, which Mediawiki also has but doesn’t want you to go crazy making your own.
• While it’s not Markdown, the markup is nicer than Mediawiki IMO. The table syntax at least is miles better

Cons

• Uglier than sin. Yes even many of the templates (themes) on offer aren’t much better. The Bootstrap 3 template seems particularly popular, and while it’s a marked improvement in most areas, like a lot of frontends that use those bootswatch pallets there are dusty corners that don’t work, like black text on a black background.
• Some stuff like tags and moving pages have to be achieved via plugins. Seriously you can’t even rename a page?
• Mutilates article titles. Makes everything lowercase and replaces non alphanumeric chars with underscores (or something else configurable).

Bookstack

Pros

• It looks good I guess. Haven’t spent much time with it.
• Yay markdown!
• Also has access control

Cons

• Also not plain text
• remember earlier when I talked about “write now, organize later”? Bookstack holds a gun to your head and forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. I know some people thrive under this limitation, but I don’t.

Other wikis I’ve tried but not to the same extent

Wiki.js

IDK, I don’t know much about this one, but don’t like the workflow of making new pages.

Gollum

Really simple, which is both good and bad.

An Otter Wiki (the article seems to be part of the name)

A lot like Gollum. Doesn’t indicate when you link to a nonexistent page. No support for article tags.

Pepperminty wiki

Looks cool but it’s abandoned

Tiddlywiki

Steep learning curve but pretty versatile. It’s a single HTML file so you can host it on something like Neocities. Really rudimentary search functions

A little bit of both. I ran a private wiki for writers to collaborate on for a project. I was doing other tech stuff for the team so it was my job to deal with it. Keeping it updated was a chore and actually using it was finicky.

For example, there was an issue we ran into where we wanted a dynamic table that pulled from other pages. Think of a shopkeeper inventory or something similar where each item was another page. Displaying an item worked fine the first time you pulled it, but if you updated the item’s page it wouldn’t push that to any page it’s displayed on. We ran into issues like this constantly. Some solutions worked, others didn’t.

After a year or so we migrated to something else. It’s free and it’s great that it exists, but it just has a roughness to it that we didn’t have the resources to deal with.

UPDATE:

I see Bookstack mentioned a lot, so I decided to try installing it. I took the better part of a day and I still can’t get it working. Pity since it looks a lot nicer than Dokuwiki and has access control unlike Mediawiki.

With this kind of mentality, nobody will ever migrate and one will have to deal with Discord’s horrible terms and conditions

The only alternative is to willingly leave over a hundred communities, some of which I have strong ties to, and never interact with the majority again.

That’s a big ask.

hey, would love to know what that error was if you have any logs or can remember, and any feedback is truly welcome!

I think you could take this arbitrarily far. Why buy a motherboard when building a computer when you should design the PCB yourself? Why go with a pre-existing processor? You should design the architecture from scratch. Why aren’t you mining your own silicon and growing your own ingots? You’re not a real nerd unless you have your own chip fab.

Some people get into self hosting because they want their data to be their data. They don’t care about the particulars, they just want that peace of mind. Others get into it because they’re already in a tech or tech-adjacent field and want to improve their skills. Some, such as myself, fall somewhere in the middle. I work in IT and am sometimes in the mood to tinker, but sometimes I just want it to work without much fuss.

Some people get into self hosting because they want their data to be their data. They don’t care about the particulars, they just want that peace of mind.

These people are the worst. What they want is fine - but the idea that you don’t need to worry about the particulars is ridiculous.

As someone who has never done any serious coding work or collaboration, hadn’t touched Linux in 18+ years and am really only fluent in windows and Mac, and with limited time to get up to speed, I fucking love opinionated guides.

Tell me exactly what to do to get it up and running. Let me learn along the way, but don’t expect me to be able to read and understand the pros and cons of lets encrypt vs other solutions.

I simply do not have the requisite base knowledge to make informed decisions on this.

If you wanna leave it up to me how to do a golden gate assembly, quick change reaction, or a gibsok assembly, I can handle that.

Understanding the nuance of docker networking, reverse DNS,maintaining SSL, and just generally how to make it so I can use a hostname and not an IP address to access my services locally is something I want to learn. Eventually.

It’s not that your critiques of guides are invalid, but they may just not be structured for general learning.