Any wiki suggestions?

[jducoeur]

Time for the next bit of tech for work: I'm looking for a good wiki. CommYou probably needs a couple of wikis -- one on the internal development server on "how you build this thing", and one on the soon-to-be public server for documentation. (I'm leaning towards a wiki for my documentation, since it allows me to open it up to trusted members of the community to help out. In general, one thing I think LJ's done right is getting the community involved.)

Anyway, there are about six million wiki platforms out there, so I'm curious whether my friends have any suggestions of good ones. My needs include:

• I'm more interested in ease of maintenance than most other features: I'd like something that's fairly easy to get configured up and running.


• I don't think I need massive power and complexity -- my needs are pretty straightforward. Some straightforward way to include images would be Very Useful, though. (This is an aspect that many wikis fall down on.)


• It needs to be stylable, but that mostly means that I should be able to apply CSS easily.


• I lean slightly towards something based on JVM/MySQL, since those will certainly be installed and working on the servers, but I'm open to Perl/PHP/whatever, so long as it's a common platform.


• Decent access control is utterly crucial, so I can open editing up to specific members of the community while keeping admin privs locked down. This is *not* going to be editable by the general public, so some kind of group management would be helpful.


• The ability to shove all the wiki framing out of the way would be Very Nice: for purposes of the average reader, I'd prefer that it look a bit more like a conventional web page.

So basically, I need something that's more powerful than basic WikiWikiWeb or ProWiki, but MediaWiki may be overkill for my purposes. (And I don't love its standard look-and-feel anyway -- it just *screams* "wiki" rather than "webpage".)

Opinions? Eventually I'll probably switch over to using Querki, but I really can't afford the month needed to get that project bootstrapped right now...

Comments

[jducoeur]

Eh -- I'm not especially fond of what I think of as the Wiki religion. To me, they're tools, to be used as makes sense. I don't love the way the tools have been conflated with a particular use case.

*MediaWiki* is designed as a massively co-operative enterprise, with social controls taking the place of formal ones. That's one valid and common use case for wikis, but far from the only one; indeed, arguably not even the dominant one. It's pretty hard to do successfully -- if you don't have a massive user base, keeping the spammers at bay is difficult.

I suspect that the majority of wikis aren't even remotely that publically-editable (a very large fraction at least require some kind of approval for editing), and many don't look quite so much *like* a wiki. For example, it's quite clear that LJ's public face is more or less entirely built in a wiki: they just choose (correctly, I believe) to not put the wiki-ish features front and center. They're there under the hood, I'm sure, but the average user doesn't see things like edit links.

So it's not so much a matter of matching the tool to the audience, as the look-and-feel you apply to that tool. I want a wiki for my infrastructure, for all the usual reasons: it's easy to edit, I can easily provide editing control to trusted users, it deals with version control, and stuff like that. But to the typical CommYou user, I want it to look more like a web page, because that's what the typical user cares about. They don't care about how this site works, or how one edits it -- they just want to find the answer to their question efficiently, with as little hassle as possible.

(One of the things that's appealing to me about XWiki, the current leading contender, is that it provides immense customization of the look-and-feel. You can have one skin for the administrators and editors, and another for the normal end users. Very sensible, and a feature I might make use of...)