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For a hobby of mine, there's an outdated lore wiki on Fandom.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 It only has unofficial container images, the documentation is outdated and (what I consider as) core functionality like WYSIWYG editor or simple infoboxes has to be added by extensions or templates.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

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.

Yeah it seems like it's doing too much for me.

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.

+1 for Bookstack. Very simple and easy to learn.

There are so, so many options here.

I've found alternativeto.net to be a great way to investigate alternative software:

https://alternativeto.net/software/mediawiki/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted

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.

I have been rolling bookstack for many years for all things that I keep for myself, it's great, been pretty much bulletproof also

Only caveat is that bookstack is very opinionated (even said so by its creator) so be sure it's what you want.

If you like Lemmy you might like ibis, also by @nutomic@lemmy.ml

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.

i like moinmoin and dokuwiki, mediawiki always felt too complex.

How did you approach finding the proper plugins?

I use mediawiki. It is not as complex as it first might seems

Thanks, I missed that.

As someone from Northern Germany, I'm obliged to check out MoinMoin!

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.

Do you need to host it yourself? https://miraheze.org/ may do hosting for you

Need? No
Want? Yes

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.

Its name is a play on the North German greeting Moin (from Wikipedia)

TIL!

I love wiki.JS
Spun up several sites with it.

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

Thanks for the example! The reasons you mentioned were why I wasn't looking into it more (using it for my local docs as well).

Thanks for sharing! I don't have a ton of experience with MediaWiki and cannot figure out how to go to a random page lol

Not at all! I did poke around some random pages after you helped me, sorry I didn't come back to my. Thanks for sharing the update, I'm keen to see how you're using DW.