wiki for household

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2012, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

Here are my thoughts.

> 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

One more:

- Revision control that non-geeks can understand (for some wikis)

> 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.

I've made extensive use of Mediawiki for personal and small business use.

> - 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

Installation on Debian is approximately 'aptitude install mediawiki' and 
entering some details on a webpage.

It has a huge numbers of plugins.  I suspect (without checking) that the 
number and variety of Mediawiki plugins dwarfs all other wikis.

>  data-base back-end.  Used by a lot of big sites, starting with
>  Wikipedia.

I'm happy for it to use an SQL backend.  I run mysqldump nightly from cron 
to backup the DB.

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

We use ikiwiki+git in SPI (http://www.spi-inc.org).  I'm not a huge fan of 
ikiwiki but everyone else seems to like it.  FWIW, I like git.

> - 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've used camelCase automatic linking in twiki and didn't like it.  More 
recent twiki/fosswiki uses a Mediawiki like syntax I think.

This raises an important point though - familiarity with syntax.  Anyone 
familiar with Wikipedia editing can become productive on a local Mediawiki 
instance immediately.

Cheers,

Rob

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