Replacement wiki instances now online
- Otterwiki public demo: https://demo.otterwiki.com/
Introduction
Our Trac instance is pretty horribly outdated (January 2024). It is only used for its Wiki as everything else has already been replaced. This article covers the pros and cons of many wikis that could be used as a replacement.
The starting points for this research:
Requirements
- Must be open source
- There must be a self-hosted option
- SaaS is ok
- LDAP auth is optional
General observations
- Most Wikis are developed by one person with generally small contributions from other developers
- Spam filtering
- Can be built-in or plugin-based
- In general seems pretty weak: Trac's Bayesian spam filter is actually pretty top-notch in this regard
- Separation of user registration (Pwm) from the application (wiki) itself probably stops most spambots, but won't help against human spammers
- Many Wikis depend completely Akismet for spam filtering
- There are plenty of "semi up-to-date" Wikis out there, but only a handful of really promising options
Open source wikis that seem most suitable
- Otterwiki
- Public demo here
- Non-bloated
- Clean interface
- Git backend
- Can be edited via Git and/or the web interface
- Supports the concept of users
- Self-service user registration
- Auto-approval can be disabled
- Can be disabled altogether
- Mediawiki
- Well-known and well-supported
Seemingly good candidates that got rejected after a closer look
- Wiki.js
- Rejected because usability of this wiki sucks bad
- Seems very modern and modular
- Support LDAP auth among all other imagineable authentication methods
- Very popular based on GitHub? statistics
- One core developer plus small contributions from a fair amount of developers (see here or in GitHub? insights)
- AGPLv3 licensed
- Spam filtering depends mainly on Akismet (details here)
- XWiki
- Rejected because of all the bloat, plus the feeling of unreliability
- Written in Java
- Seems to have a lively development community with many subprojects
- Focus seems to be about building "wiki applications", so XWiki is very extensible
- Has LDAP support (see here)
- Spam filtering support seems to somewhat weak:
Other possibly suitable open source wikis
- Gollum
- Up-to-date wiki documentation in here
- Stores wikis as Git repos
- Support for logging in as a user relies on Git repository's authentication by default
- Authenticating from elsewhere (LDAP?) can be implemented with some effort
- It should be able to use Wiki repos from GitHub and GitLab
- Seems fairly popular
- One core developer plus small contributions from a fair amount of developers (see here)
- Bluespice
- Productized enterpriseishy distribution of Mediawiki with lots of additional (open source) plugins
- Seems quite popular
- FOSWiki
- Written in Perl
- Fairly large community
- Seems to have a lively development community with many subprojects
- A fork of TWiki from ~2008
- Git repo: https://github.com/foswiki
- Has LDAP support
- Seems to have commercial support available
- Docuwiki
- Written in PHP, uses Composer
- Mainly developed by one person
- Fairly large community
- Git repo: https://github.com/dokuwiki/dokuwiki
- LDAP support built-in (see here)
- Supports ACLs based on pages and namespaces
- File-based by default
- Spam filtering seems a bit weak:
- MoinMoin
- JSPWiki
- Written in Java (J2EE)
- Maintained by Apache Foundation, but seems to have just one responsible developer
- Supports LDAP authentication
- Supports ACLs
- Enterprise-ishy
- Spam filter support seems reasonable
- Would probably work fine
Unsuitable alternatives that were reviewed
Open source wikis with wrong focus
- Pukiwiki
- Japanese only, which is a blocker-ish at minimum
- Tiki Wiki CMS
- CMS framework, not a wiki
- PMwiki
- "A wiki-based content-management system (CMS) for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites"
- Bookstack
- Written in PHP + Laravel
- Mainly developed by one person
- Project seems lively and has a fair amount of sponsors
- Opinionated
- "BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information."
- In practice it seems to focus on "books" rather than "pages"
- Public demo is available here
- There are no plans to expand the scope of the platform
- TiddlyWiki
- Personal wiki, not for collaboration
- Zim
- Desktop wiki -> Not for collaborative editing
Non-open source wikis
- GitHub wikis
- Wikidot
- PBWiki
- EditMe
- Papyrs
- Outline
- Tries to masquerade as open source by having BUSL-licensed source code available in GitHub
- ...and a bunch of others, look here
Open source wikis that are outdated
- TWiki
- Feature-vise TWiki looks pretty cool
- However, "TWiki is a cgi-bin script written in Perl. It reads a text file, hyperlinks it and converts it to HTML on the fly.", which is slightly worrying
- Forked as FOSWiki, so questionable as an open source project
- PHPWiki
- Seems a tad old-school (uses SVN etc)
- Does support recent PHP 8.x, so not outdated per se
- UseMod
- Written in Perl
- Looks quite outdated from bling bling perspective
- Ikiwiki
- Seems outdated
- Erfurtwiki
- Not maintained anymore (since ~2015)
- Wikkawiki
- Not maintained anymore (since ~2020)
Last modified 3 months ago
Last modified on 08/09/24 06:53:53