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For a hobby of mine, there’s an outdated lore wiki on Fandom.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 It only has unofficial container images, the documentation is outdated and (what I consider as) core functionality like WYSIWYG editor or simple infoboxes has to be added by extensions or templates.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

  • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago

    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)

  • TomAwezome@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • osanna@lemmy.vgEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    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.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      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.

      • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

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

        • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          44 minutes ago

          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.

      • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        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.

      • vestigeofgreen@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        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.

  • themachine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      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.