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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For a hobby of mine, there’s an outdated lore wiki on Fandom.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 It only has unofficial container images, the documentation is outdated and (what I consider as) core functionality like WYSIWYG editor or simple infoboxes has to be added by extensions or templates.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?

MediaWiki’s probably overkill for basic wiki functionality, but I use it for the sake of Semantic MediaWiki and associated extensions. But SMW has more of a learning curve, so it might not be worth it for a casual-use wiki.

Yeah it seems like it’s doing too much for me.

Maybe skim this recent post? https://lemmy.world/post/43616899 Lot of folks chimed in about their opinions on many different wiki approaches, my takeaway was that Bookstack looked like something I’d wanna use in the future, but there’s a lot of stuff covered in there.

+1 for Bookstack. Very simple and easy to learn.

There are so, so many options here.

I’ve found alternativeto.net to be a great way to investigate alternative software:

https://alternativeto.net/software/mediawiki/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted

Someone just posted their own short reviews of a slew of wiki options in this community so maybe go take a peek at that.

Personally I’m finding I like Otterwiki quite a lot though I’ve not yet dug deep into it.

I have been rolling bookstack for many years for all things that I keep for myself, it’s great, been pretty much bulletproof also

Only caveat is that bookstack is very opinionated (even said so by its creator) so be sure it’s what you want.

If you like Lemmy you might like ibis, also by @nutomic@lemmy.ml

I use Dokuwiki for my small fantasy wiki project. I use many plugins to achieve the functionality and style that I want, but it works well for my needs. None of the others I looked at could do quite everything I wanted.

i like moinmoin and dokuwiki, mediawiki always felt too complex.

How did you approach finding the proper plugins?

I use mediawiki. It is not as complex as.it.first seems

Thanks, I missed that.

As someone from Northern Germany, I’m obliged to check out MoinMoin!

I considered functions that I wanted (for example, tags) and looked to see if there was a plugin that did what I wanted. Dokuwiki’s plugin browser was very useful for this.

Do you need to host it yourself? https://miraheze.org/ may do hosting for you

Need? No
Want? Yes

I settled on mediawiki myself due to basically how trustworthy mediawiki and mediawiki skins look. I use https://github.com/CanastaWiki/Canasta-DockerCompose myself but the default includes caddy, which I just overrode in the docker compose override. I believe Canasta is mainly driven by someone who works on a wiki farm.

I also know of https://github.com/nasa/meza.

However, I want to repeat my recommendation of miraheze. When I run into an issue or need an extension, I just look at what miraheze does or what people associated with miraheze do. I also believe that due to the nature of mediawiki it’s a better use of resources to have a wiki farm as opposed to many separate instances. If they will host your wiki, I think they’re the best choice.

Its name is a play on the North German greeting Moin (from Wikipedia)

TIL!

you’re gonna get a LOT of opinions here. Try some out and find what you like the best. Personally, I run Dokuwiki, mostly because i can just zip the whole directory, and move it to another server or back it up a LOT easier than something like MediaWiki.

I love wiki.JS Spun up several sites with it.

TPGB6J23pl135bB.gif
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chud.win splaat.farm
yo wp

Bookstack comes up a lot when “easy to use” is mentioned. It has a WYSYWIG editor by default and has a fairly simple install using a shell script on their docs website. Problems I have with it are it’s not really a wiki. You can’t link to nonexistent pages or see what other pages link to the current page. It’s more of a documentation system.

But I’ve seen it out in the wild being used for your use case (Tunic game wiki)

I’m currently migrating my worldbuilding and conlanging project to Dokuwiki. Right now I have an Obsidian vault used for brainstorming and drafting and a public Mediawiki for stuff I feel is worth showing off. Like Obsidian, DW stores everything as plaintext (it’s not markdown but it’s readable and the tables are better IMO). Like Mediawiki, DW keeps a version history so I can keep track of how my ideas evolve over time, which is crucial for conlang documentation. I keep tons of example texts that may reflect earlier phases of the grammar and vocab that I may need to reference. Unlike both Obsidian and MW, Dokuwiki has access control, so I can keep a private namespace for drafts and a public namespace for stuff I think is polished enough to show.

I’m not sure DW meet’s OP’s requirements for “out of the box” functionality though. I think it’s intended to be rather bare bones but be very easy to extend with plugins. The plugin browser is built in, so customization is a breeze. Plugins can be individually installed, enabled, disabled, and updated through the admin GUI.

Otter’s almost there. It needs a few things before I’d call it a wiki rather than just a documentation system, namely backlinks and a way to differentiate between links to existing and nonexisting pages, as well as a way to see what nonexisting pages are most wanted.

If you wouldn’t mind sharing, I’d love to take a gander at what you’re cooking up!

The DW instance isn’t public (yet) but here’s a link to the currently public mediawiki instance.

https://constructed.world/

I never invested the time to make the content very discoverable, so you’ll have to make copious use of the random page and what links here features if you want to see what I’ve written.

Enjoy my stress-induced maladaptive daydreams.

Thanks for the example! The reasons you mentioned were why I wasn’t looking into it more (using it for my local docs as well).

Thanks for sharing! I don’t have a ton of experience with MediaWiki and cannot figure out how to go to a random page lol

It’s behind the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines on the top left of the page), at least with the latest default skin.

If I haven’t scared you away with my nonsense, the DW instance is now public. The link I provided earlier should point to the new server. https://constructed.world/

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.