Which Wiki is right for you?

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 02:54:52PM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote:
>> I've recently been looking at setting up my own personal wiki.
>> Part of my desires is the it be F/OSS, and backed by a Revision
>> control system.
>>
>> Media Wiki is right out on the above two, and that leaves almost 200
>> others wiki solutions out there to choose from.
>
> Why would you want it backed by revision control when part of the point of
> most wikis is that they have revision history in them and easily viewable.
>
> And mediawiki only fails on one as far as I can tell.

I very much like the notion of having the capture be done in a
distributed SCM, as this means that I can have copies pulled out
"offline" very easily.

The GTALUG wiki currently resides in a Mediawiki instance; having my
"own copy" would require that I take a backup of the database, and
install a duplicate of its configuration on my own server.  And any
hacking around I might do with my copy would need to be re-done in
order to get the "master" updated.

In contrast, supposing it was managed using ikiwiki +Git, then, given
a suitable address, I could readily "git clone" and have my own copy
that I could keep up to date as easily as a cron entry of "* * 1 * *
(cd /home/cbbrowne/GTALUG.git; git pull origin master)".  And that
update would incrementally capture changes; it wouldn't need to be a
'full backup.'

Further, given an ssh key, I could hack on my copy, and "git push
origin master" to push my changes over to the "official" instance.

I observe that this is exactly what Software In The Public Interest
has done with their web site:
<http://git.spi-inc.org/gitweb/?p=website.git> is the Git repo that
publishes <http://spi-inc.org/>.  I note that "our own" Robert
Brockway is one of the heavy editors of that repo :-).

I haven't been entirely thrilled with ikiwiki (http://ikiwiki.info) in
my bit of playing with it; I'm keeping my eyes peeled as other things
like gitit, git-wiki, emerge.

Here's a nice description of things someone else found dreadful about
wiki implementations that I, at first glance, mostly agree with.
<http://blog.tommorris.org/day/2008/03/09#pid2761430>
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists