[Discuss] Creating a Wiki server

[dnb at ccs.neu.edu (David N. Blank-Edelman)]

On Aug 31, 2011, at 11:44 AM, David Miller wrote:

> DokuWiki is definitely worth a look if you're taking the time to vet out a
> few candidate solutions.  

So I'd like to speak against this choice. My experience is one or two years out of date, but it is at the center of of my failed projects for a non-profit I set it up for. At the point I implemented it, it had a very non-computer person unfriendly interface. Simple things like creating new pages (it uses the wiki standard of creating a link in a page to that non-existent page or searching for a page that doesn't exist) or renaming pages (create new page, copy contents, empty out contents of original page) are way too hard. As a result, very few people at this organization opted to use this wiki. I am actively migrating people off that wiki to something else as fast as I can and learning from the experience as much as I can.

For alternatives, I'm fond of the commercial package Confluence (which I think has either small group free uses or free use by open source projects). Two other alternatives (if you don't want to host your own) are Google Sites or http://www.wikidot.com/.

For a good comparison of wiki engines, check out http://www.wikimatrix.org/.

     -- dNb