Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

den4b · 2009-05-06 11:38

I have been thinking about setting up a wiki for writing collaborative documentation for my programs, like Narayan have suggested in the other topic.

Two clear candidates came up after researching for quite some time: DokuWiki and MediaWiki.

Comparison of features can be found at wikimatrix.org: Comparison of DokuWiki and MediaWiki.

Both systems can be tested online: DokuWiki Demo and MediaWiki Demo

From my point of view, they are both suitable, and the only reall differences between them are in storage and complexity. DokuWiki uses and plain text storage and may somehow be simpler. MediaWiki uses databases and may be too complex for the scale of our job.

So guys, who thinks it is a good idea? By that question, I guess what I am really asking is: Will people actually be using it, editing, maintaining? I will not going to be able to maintain it by myself for a very simple reason - absence of free time, as most of you have probably guessed. I can setup it up, as long as people will be using it, otherwise, it will be a lot easier for me to maintain the user manual in a word document for example.

So please, cast your vote.

Andrew · 2009-05-07 11:17

Well, I took a quick look at the two demos, and frankly I found MediaWiki to be much closer in appearance/behaviour to what I consider the reference implementation, i.e. Wikipedia. The only point to be considered is, how easy will it be to set up and to export Narayan's edits to it (from OpenOffice format)? Is it as simple as exporting to HTML and importing that?

As far as actually using it goes, the thing is, what's the purpose going to be? Is it to be used only temporarily and then the content moved to the offline help files? If on the other hand it is going to be up there permanently as online documentation, then I'm sure like any other wiki it'll get refined slowly as time goes on. (Though it'll also need to be protected from spam, vandalism etc.) But if the latter, then what about the offline help files? Does MediaWiki provide some sort of feature to on demand export all content in properly formatted HTML/DOC/PDF/etc. format? If so, that will be great as it will solve both problems - we can have continuously evolving online docs, and periodic updates to the offline docs as well.

In any case, my vote goes to MediaWiki for the familiar editing tags etc. it uses, as anyone who has edited Wikipedia articles can attest.

narayan · 2009-05-09 05:11

I second Andrew:
(a) Mediawiki is preferred
(b) It should have export+import facility to any offline medium,

*********
A more fundamental thinking is provided here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software

Also see-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki

Comparison-wise, both are neck-to-neck (and as Andrew rightly pointed out, both will go on improving even further). However, at present, there are a few important features missing in docuwiki AT PRESENT:

Complex tables (tables with merged cells and nested tables) are very important for good-looking documentation.

Text indentation and text-alignment are important for good visual impact. The comparison table says docuwiki does not have these features (possible???)

Only Mediawiki has these features.

@importing:
Both are WYSIWYG editors. Then logically, we should be able to simply copy and paste material from the odf/doc version of the manual! So lack of importing may not be crippling for us. Exporting would be required, though.

@exporting:
Mediawiki has this feature.
See the link here:http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
It creates pdf files from the existing (latest??) content.
It is driven by Mediawiki (see bottom of the page)

@maintenance concerns:
We should see this issue in two separate parts:
(a) Loss of contents (text+database) and
(b) Breakdown of the engine

The content can be backed up by any volunteer (better, this can be automated).
The second part is not critical: If the software gets corrupted, we can simply start over with a clean installation- no repairing. (The down side of this approach is that the site may be down for a few hours, and some latest edits may be lost. That is ok because anyway we do not expect heavy editing/traffic, as in www.wikipedia.org. Besides, we can always plan for the offline version, which will serve the users' day-to-day needs. So even if the site is down for a few hours, it is not a big loss)

BTW Why not Drupal?
It has many advantages over mediawiki:
http://www.empowerthyself.com/mediawikiisobsolete

Last edited by narayan (2009-05-09 05:55)

den4b · 2009-05-09 23:25

The major difference between Drupal and MediaWiki (or any other wiki) is that wikis are aimed for creating an information base while Drupal is a content management system. Drupal is way to big for this task, you could even say that it is "too good"

I don't think we need fancy WYSIWYG editing. In fact, for creating documentation it is better to have something like a wiki where format is generalized, otherwise different users would create different formatting, layouts, etc. I wouldn't worry about system failures, quality hosting and their databases rarely fail. Also, I am making regular backups of the database.

I am not sure if we'll ever need to keep an offline copy of the documentation (apart from the database backup of course), more and more people and organization tend to switch to an online manual / documentation and it seem to work fine. This is probably because of the fact that internet is much more accessible than it was even few years ago.

So I guess we are all in favour of MediaWiki.

Andrew · 2009-05-10 00:25

den4b wrote:

I am not sure if we'll ever need to keep an offline copy of the documentation (apart from the database backup of course), more and more people and organization tend to switch to an online manual / documentation and it seem to work fine. This is probably because of the fact that internet is much more accessible than it was even few years ago.

Well, I don't entirely agree with you here, for there may be many instances where an internet connection is not available/readily accessible and it may be far easier/quicker to simply load/read/search a local PDF copy of the docs. Anyway, it's not an issue as Narayan has pointed out that MediaWiki supports exporting to PDF. So even if it's not included with the download as such, there could be a link provided for the user to click, which could then possibly on-demand export the latest doc version to PDF and allow the user to save it locally.

narayan · 2009-05-10 10:19

I like that idea!

narayan · 2009-05-10 11:48

I took a closer look at Mediawiki.

Editing in Mediawiki is explained here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents

The one point where I am not clear is how to make tables. (The manual contains a large number of tables, so this consideration is important.)

Creating tables seems to be quire difficult in Mediawiki. I expected a WYSIWYG way of inserting a table, as in MS Word. But it seems we need to use markup language, according to the description given here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Tables

That page shows that the user has to laboriously compose a table with different control characters that create the different elements of the table (headers, borders and so on.)

Further, that page recommends that authors should avoid inserting tables altogether!

A bullet list will not look quite the same, although we can manage with that.

There is another page on this topic here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

This too looks a bit complicated. Not what I expected (a simple "point-and-click" affair).
Does anyone have a real experience with Mediawiki tables?

I also wonder if Drupal is not better after all! I know from my own experience that authoring in Drupal is extremely easy, just like MS Word. Everything (insertion of elements and formatting) available through toolbar.

To ensure maximum contribution from the public, the wiki tool must be simple for novice editors. They won't be comfortable if they have to use too much of markup.

Another thing is when we edit, the page does not show true WYSIWYG formatting (as in Drupal or MS Word). Rather, the text contains a lot of extra characters embedded in the text. For example, the bolding is shown as
''' text to be shown in bold''',
rather than-
text to be shown in bold

Drupal works in true WYSIWYG fashion- You see the final effects as you type.

Just my two cents!

Andrew · 2009-05-10 21:10

Yes Narayan, that is correct. I don't have much experience with Drupal, but its editor is considerably more WYSIWYG when compared to editing a wiki using its own tags. So it's not as intuitive for a new person as Drupal maybe, but then again, from my own experience editing Wikipedia, it's not too hard either. After all, thousands of people have edited Wikipedia articles, and I'm pretty sure they're not all computer experts, eh? Also, if we talk about tags and intuitive editing, then what about BBCode? This very site and these very comments use BBCode, and you can do a lot of things with that analogous to HTML, but you either have to remember the tags or else use the toolbar provided, just like in Wikipedia. So I don't really see the problem with a wiki as well. 'Course, that's just my two cents, so let's see what Denis finally decides to install!

Last edited by Andrew (2009-05-10 21:11)

narayan · 2009-05-11 01:45

Point to ponder:
How to import the existing manual, given the non-compatibility of formatting between an odt/doc file and Mediawiki.

Will we have to re-enter everything manually? The manual contains very less running text. Most of the content is in tables.

den4b · 2009-05-11 04:58

I've just typed "doc to mediawiki" in google and the first link to come up was very useful:
Converting documents to mediawiki markup

openwetware.org wrote:

With the release of OpenOffice 2.3/2.4, OpenOffice can now export documents to MediaWiki format. Since OpenOffice can also read MS Word documents, this allows OpenOffice to serve as a Word to MediaWiki converted.

I am not sure how well it will handle tables, but it sounds promising.

den4b Forum

#1 2009-05-06 11:38

Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#2 2009-05-07 11:17

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#3 2009-05-09 05:11

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#4 2009-05-09 23:25

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#5 2009-05-10 00:25

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#6 2009-05-10 10:19

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#7 2009-05-10 11:48

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#8 2009-05-10 21:10

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#9 2009-05-11 01:45

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

#10 2009-05-11 04:58

Re: Setting up a Wiki: DokuWiki or MediaWiki

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