wiki for household

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I'm thinking that it might be nice to have a wiki in our house.  I don't 
want one in the cloud for privacy reasons.

Christopher Browne suggested I try to pick TLUG's brains.

What might the wiki be used for?  Who knows until we live with it for a 
while.

- inventories, including photos

- documenting various kinds of projects (software, hardware, crafts, 
  culinary (eg. recipes)

- collections of documents like manuals, links to interesting things

- possibly replacing our paper filing system (I've got a great scanner for 
  this purpose; now I need to software architecture).  We have a lot of 
  paper.


Why a wiki?

- easy to add stuff

- not needing to shoehorn into a restrictive structure (eg. 
  conventional database)

- hope that the info is long lived: not in a proprietary format, supported 
  by a vibrant community, easy to migrate


Things we need:

- light weight (I don't want to become further burdened as a sysadmin)

- stable (change management isn't fun)

- strong community (to ensure long and healthy life)

- good support for history (revision control) and backups

- simplicity

- pleasant and easy support for pictures and other non-text

- easy & powerful markup that isn't intrusive (true of all wikis, but some 
  better than others)

- grow with our needs (whatever that might turn out to be)


Initial thoughts:

I looked at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software> as 
a starting place.  Open source + Linux were required, for a start.

- mediawiki looks big to me.  But it is probably a well-travelled road and 
  might not be that hard to install.  I'm slightly biased against a 
  data-base back-end.  Used by a lot of big sites, starting with 
  Wikipedia.

- DokuWiki.  Don't know enough.  Not ruled out.

- Gitit has some good qualities: git (or other distributed revision 
  control system) back end.  Coded in haskell (sexier than PHP).
  Supports LaTex.  Does it have staying power?

- ikiwiki.  Perl isn't my favourite (but then neither is PHP).  Uses
  git (or others) as backend.  Looks to be popular (good).

- MoinMoun.  Python sounds good to me. CamelCase links seem
  questionable to me (I'm used to mediawiki's square brackets).
  Flat-file backend seems good and simple.  Don't know how revision
  control is managed.

I don't really know how these handle my requirements.

Anyone have any thoughts about this?
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