
If you haven't been to our
OS Resources page lately, you haven't missed much action, because like many online resource pages, a lot of effort went into it long ago when it was launched, but it's been lacking attention since, with only occasional updates. Alas, thus is the sorrow of Web 1.0. We'd like to drag OS Resources into the participatory web, and let the OSNews community help keep it up to date. Wiki seems like an obvious solution. So I'd like to ask, dear readers, is there a Wiki system that you think would be especially good for a small-but-growing OS Resource guide? There's
Mediawiki, of course, but it seems a bit heavyweight and user-unfriendly for something small and simple. I've had good experience with
Mindtouch Deki, but thought I should examine other options before picking it. So what do you think? Is Wiki the way to go, if so, which one? And what would you like to see in our new OS Resources?
Member since:
2005-11-14
I've administered MoinMoin and MediaWiki. Here are my observations:
MoinMoin uses plain files; MediaWiki uses a database (MySQL apparently preferred). The MediaWiki people seem to think that plain files are a problem, but they're a lot easier to work with if you're doing batch stuff.
MoinMoin reformed their syntax a few versions ago; MediaWiki uses awful syntax which kind of degrades into a bastardized form of HTML and insists on stuff like [[Image:xxx]] with lots of tweaking required. This leads me to...
MoinMoin comes with half-decent help; MediaWiki doesn't come with help and will have you horsing around getting the "public domain" help from their site and actually exporting it from their Wiki, then importing it into your Wiki.
The MoinMoin site seems a bit disorganised in places, but it's quite a bit better than some of the "he says, she says" stuff going on in parts of the MediaWiki site. And I guess I'm a bit old school when I prefer to download releases of extensions rather than having to download virtually essential extensions as snapshots from someone's personal Wiki somewhere, which is what I've seen with MediaWiki.
Yes, Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki in some server farm somewhere. There are a bunch of high profile MoinMoin sites, too: the Ubuntu Wiki at the very least is a MoinMoin site, and there are plenty more out there.