Mark Levison

Musings on No Touch Deployment, .NET development and photography

<July 2008>
SuMoTuWeThFrSa
293012345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
272829303112
3456789


Navigation

Other

Blogroll

Subscriptions

Post Categories



Help me choose a Wiki for our internal knowledge base

We're in the process of trying to pick a Wiki for our internal corporate knowledge base. Our company has ~40 employees; most of them will use the wiki eventually. In all likelihood only about 20 of them will ever try to edit it but not all of them have a technical background as result the less markup they need to learn the better.

I would like your help with two things:

  1. What features would you add to my list?
  2. What other wikis are worth considering

My list of features

  1. RSS Feeds for changes
  2. Versioning (History) - must include dates on notes so we know how old they are. Differencing should make differences clear (highlighting?)
  3. Supports free links (ie links other than the CamelCase style)
  4. Still in Active Development
  5. Should support "preformatted blocks". In a perfect world - we could paste code snippets in from various languages and have at least basic formatting (keyword highlighting etc,)
  6. WYSIWYG - lite - just support for the Wiki Markup. The goal is to make adoption as simple as possible (Even a toolbar that applied the basic formatting in plain text would ease the learning curve).
  7. Search displays some context (google style).
  8. Edit per paragraph or some other mechanism that makes editing a long page of text a little bit easier. (Underlying problem: You click edit and must scroll a long way to find the text you intended to change).
  9. User Authentication - preferably using Windows login
  10. Supports attachment of files (a necessary evil)
  11. Ease of install and administration
  12. Doesn't require heroic effort to display any characters (snipsnap.org makes it difficult to do backslashes)

The choices

  1. PmWiki - excellent formatting capabilities - possibly even preformatted blocks of code with formatting. No wysiwyg.
  2. MediaWiki - runs Wikipedia et al - Wysiwyg: formatting toolbar - but results are Wiki ML
  3. Tiki Wiki - many features, some concerns have been raised about its stability (these concerns maybe out of date). No Wysiwyg
  4. MoinMoin - feature rich.
  5. UseMod Wiki - a well respected wiki - development is slow, may not have RSS feeds for changes.
  6. FlexWiki - recently open sourced by MS
  7. TracWiki - wysiwyg (coming next release) - simple formatting with toolbar already supported. Integrates with subversion (our sccs). It also has a bug tracking/project management system as well. Is the wiki a side effect or an integral part? It looks slick.
  8. PhpWikiit was only just recommended to my so I know nothing about it.

What do you suggest?

Update: I forgot to add that given the number of open source alternatives it would be difficult to justify spending money on hosted service (like SocialText).

Tim Tabor pointed me to this comparison http://www.splitbrain.org/dokuwiki/wiki:compare

posted on Saturday, November 13, 2004 11:13 AM by mlevison





Powered by Dot Net Junkies, by Telligent Systems