Which wiki to use after MediaWiki?

Question

We're thinking of moving from our existing installation of MediaWiki to something more feature-rich. I'm trying to find all the pains people have with MediaWiki today (mainly it's poor handling of external documents and less-than-perfect editing capabilities - compared to Word).

We are using a wiki for design, spec, process guidelines. We have several external documents (docs, powerpoints) that we are currently putting on a shared folder and linking to from the wiki (because uploading files is not very convenient in MediaWiki). We are trying to make the friction minimum, so that nobody will have an excuse or reason for not using it.

Some options we're considering are Confluence, Trac & Sharepoint. Money is not a big concern, only ease of use (and maintenance) and feature-fullness. What would you use?

Solution 1

I would plug the details of my specific feature needs into the excellent WikiMatrix choice wizard and let it make recommendations.

Solution 2

I would advise either

• Foswiki ( http://foswiki.org ), (forked by the whole developer community of TWiki to avoid trademark threats), for a feature-rich and fully open programmer's wiki. Drop on #foswiki on irc.freenode.net to chat with the community.
• Mindtouch's Deki Wiki ( http://www.mindtouch.com/ ) clearly the most user-friendly advanced and innovative wiki out there, a modern commercial + open source offering. Great integration with Office docs.

I would avoid Confluence. Confluence made a design choice (forbidding mixing html in pages with Wiki syntax) that proves deadly to any attempt at wysiwyg, as it uses a standard HTML editor for WYSIWYG, and this converts it on save in a very limited subset of it, yielding frustrating surprises for the users (foswiki for instance keeps as html the parts the wiki syntax do not handle like bullet lists in table cells). Confluence have many great sides, notably its integration with atlassian great tools as their JIRA bugtracker, (we use it at work for this with good results) but do not plan to customize it.

There are many good choices on hosted wikis too (Google sites, based on the awesome jotspot engine is one).

Never use Sharepoint of course. Its wiki capabilities are a IE-only joke, and Sharepoint whole architecture is braindead (storing all data - even huge docs - in a non-distributed database goes against Microsoft own recommendations). If you want a DMS with good Office integration, have a look at KT (Knowledge Tree) instead. http://www.knowledgetree.com/ . For political reasons we were forced to use Sharepoint at work but we limited it to basic document managing (never use the MOSS higher layer, as it breaks compatibility between versions) and integrated a foswiki frontend to it (dumped document list & metadata in xml and provided navigation in foswiki, and search with a google box)

But my real advice would be to ... wait for Google wave, that promises to revolutionize the wiki concepts.

Disclaimer: I am part of the foswiki community.

Solution 3

Before you move away from Mediawiki I would urge you to consider the many extensions available. IMO there arent many wikis that offer more features that MW, especially when you consider the number of extensions. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions

For example, for editing there are browser based editors similar to Word. And there even macros for Word that allow you to export from MS Word to your Wiki, from within Word.

Also, check out the Semantic Mediawiki extensions. These give enormousness benefits in the area of Knowledge Management.

Solution 4

I would personally recommend against moving from Wiki to SharePoint. The huge problem there is SP's dreadful handling of images.

Solution 5

First of all I would stay away from Sharepoint. Period.

I would not consider switching to Trac either, since Trac has special focus on issue tracking, and poor support for external documents.

I would consider switching to Confluence, since:

• Money is not an issue (as you said)
• You want to minimise maintanance work (as you said)
• You want to use wiki to handle external documents (as you said)

I'm typically a strong advocate of open source technology, but with the requirements you gave, I just don't think they would make you happy. For instance if you had personnel available for maintaining and providing customisations to your system, I would definitely suggest trying out Foswiki, which also would otherwise fit your needs very nicely. However, if you really want to stay away from any extra maintance work, Foswiki is not a good option.

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