10 ms·

Self Host a Wiki or Knowledge Base for Your Team

115 points by chsasank 6y ago

Nemo_bis 6y ago
Outline is proprietary software. https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE Also, are you saying it requires you to run Slack alongside? There are many good and free software wiki engines, I don't see why one would choose such a headache. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
- chsasank 6y ago
  I looked at BookStack, dokuwiki, mediawiki and multiple other open source wikis. None of them are as intuitive and easy to use as outline.
  - chvid 6y ago
    I was just wondering how Outline made money / was intending to make money. This seems like an ok way to do things.
  - waf 6y ago
    Did you look at wiki.js ( https://wiki.js.org/ https://wiki.js.org/ )? I've been evaluating wikis too, and that's at the top of my list because it checks the boxes of having a git backend, markdown, and third-party auth providers. Only downside is that it's NodeJS, which I'd rather not deal with given our existing tech stack, but as an internal app it should be fine.
    - chsasank 6y ago
      I did. It's interface is not as intuitive and streamlined as Outline. Our team found outline super intuitive because Outline's collections and Slack's channels are equivalent.
    - sdwolfz 6y ago
      I've installed wikijs for a small team of developers at their request. The biggest selling point for this piece of software, compared to showing them 5 other alternatives, is that it looks good, it's eye candy. And that is exactly what I've seen people want from software like these. They want to feel good when they open it and browse, they want to see a modern look, it makes the experience of using and maintaining a knowledge base more appealing so they engage more. Feature wise it's no confluence, nor xwiki, it's just a page editor with user management, but it's quick to set up, uses extreemely little memory by default, feels fast and looks good, so they don't mind if they see some functionality missing. Among more and more tools that I install for people I see this pattern where they are judged by their looks above features, and it's not easy for me to fully understand it... But then again I started learning and programming ruby for the same reason, it looked and felt good, so I stuck with it. So I guess the big takeaway here is not a large pepperoni pizza from domino's, but the fact that software looks matter, a lot, and it's probably going to matter more and more in the future.
      - waf 6y ago
        ah, interesting. I guess the implication in your comment is that there are other, more capable alternatives (but not as "pretty"). What are some of the criteria where wikijs is lacking? For me, wikijs was leading in all the criteria I mentioned in my original post.
      - mekster 6y ago
        What's not so easy to understand that the looks matter? I've gone through a list of wiki apps a few months ago as DokuWiki was showing its age, every time the demo page looked like some web from the 90's, I don't care what features it has but closed it instantly. I do full stack web but I make sure it's also visually pleasing for anything I build because there's no reason to give users eye pain. I'd rather think that anything that doesn't look good means the author had no time for visual adjustment as the internals still has a lot to be desired.
    - mekster 6y ago
      Second wiki.js. I've used DokuWiki for over a decade but it's showing its age. It's just a collection of hacks to add features and sometimes third party plugins are too buggy but wiki.js has most of what I wanted built-in. It had WYSIWYG editor. Frankly a bare markdown editor is out of the question as it is never intuitive for anyone but some techie who likes remembering all the tags and I'm s programmer for a long time but I'd take WYSIWYG any day for managing structured documents. It has plenty of auth targets from LDAP to oauth and many others. It doesn't force you with some weird rule such as "link first and create page" but just hit the "New page" button and since it has list of pages for both front side and the admin panel, you'll never have some page left in limbo. Admin panel is good. It lets you put custom CSS, so you can control the look pretty well including removing the parts you don't want. Custom navigation let's you add any links in the menu and access control is good, so it's easy to allow a group of people access certain pages. And it looks good. I'm just a user.
  - slantyyz 6y ago
    Yeah, I did similar research as you and found that none of them were sticky enough for my uses. WikiJS came the closest, but it didn't feel 100% baked yet. I'm currently using Dropbox Paper as my pseudo-wiki, which is... OK until I find something better. For me, I like that Paper supports Markdown shortcuts (which for me personally, is the most important editor feature) and is minimalist.
    - wittyreference 6y ago
      I use Kiwi wiki on my phone, host the files on my dropbox, and access it via Sublime (with markdown add-ons) on my pc. I've also been experimenting with Obsidian, which so far looks like it might be better.
- tommoor 6y ago
  Slack or Google can be used as sign-in options, email can also be used once a team is created but not for the initial registration. There is a community PR that's being worked on to make the auth system a bit more pluggable, I'd link if GitHub was online.
techsupporter 6y ago
Unless I am remembering wrong (and the copy stored at the Internet Archive seems to agree with me[0]), you're not allowed to use the Outline source code for production use and you're definitely not allowed to use it in a way that lets third parties contribute to it. A non-free blob of software that requires integration with a definitely non-free separate service (Slack) that I can't also self-host doesn't sound all that attractive to someone (like me) who is interested in self-hosting. The software is pretty but those sparkly binds are a bit too tight. 0 - Had to check here since, as of writing, Github is under the weather: http://web.archive.org/web/20200614175138/https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE http://web.archive.org/web/20200614175138/https://github.com...
- tommoor 6y ago
  The BSL is meant to be open source "in spirit", with the sole restriction being that you can't run a competitive hosted service because that's the only way the project sustains itself. Internally hosting a copy for your own company is purposefully within the bounds of the license.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Not a lawyer, but that sounds a bit wishy-washy, which corporate lawyers are really not fond of. It's part of the reason why the JSON standard was problematic for a while, because it had a clause stating that it "should be used for Good, not Evil", which is a legal nightmare.
    - enjoylife 6y ago
      Ditto on the not a lawyer aspect, but this seems pretty straightforward: You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document Service. A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that allows third parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access the functionality of the Licensed Work by creating teams and documents controlled by such third parties.
greggman3 6y ago
2003-2006 my team used Lotus Notes as our team wiki. It was so much nicer than an actual wiki if only because there was a tree view on the left and it would highlight in bold anything that had been updated since you last read it. The tree view also let you see the entire content rather than just a random bunch of pages you might have to spider through to find things. Any wikis do that? Track individual reading? and which ones have the best non-techie UX where I can easily add images, diagrams, video, without having to jump through hoops?
- tommoor 6y ago
  I'd say Outline, almost fits the bill – individual read tracking is happening in the background but we don't yet surface that to the user – there's an open issue for this and it should get tackled soon, I'd link to GitHub if it wasn't down :)
- eitland 6y ago
  > Any wikis do that? Track individual reading? and which ones have the best non-techie UX where I can easily add images, diagrams, video, without having to jump through hoops? OneNote - while not a real wiki in my opinion - was close enough and could do this and I sometimes recommended it to Microsoft centric clients of mine. Now they are leaving the version I liked behind but some people might enjoy the new version.
  - carlosf 6y ago
    I wish One Note allowed markdown blocks, I like how easy you can paste things like pictures and drawings, but it does not work well for stuff like code blocks.
    - eitland 6y ago
      Off the top of my mind tagging is also a weak spot (it insists on users using one of a number of defined tags, and while tags can be added it takes time and you also cannot type them out but have to rely on clumsy nested dropdows for all but the top 10 that can be reached via keyboard shortcuts.) I'm fairly certain there was more problems but all in all OneNote still used to be a good solutions for smaller companies that was stuck in Microsoft land anyway.
makethetick 6y ago
If you're already using Google docs internally then https://youneedawiki.com/ https://youneedawiki.com/ is a great front end for a quick and easy wiki
rglullis 6y ago
Others have already pointed out that outline is not really open source, so I will just link to the one alternative that worked for me as a self-hosted, open source (straight AGPL) alternative to Confluence: https://documize.com https://documize.com
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  Also worth noting that Outline's license seems to come from the future: Change Date: 2023-07-03
  - vvillena 6y ago
    That's the date when the licensed software becomes GPL-compatible. That's the main feature of the BSL.
znpy 6y ago
I started using mediawiki as a personal knowledge base and it's working very well for me. Working with categories is still on the todo list for me, as I would like something similar to a tree-view, but I'm in no hurry. Also, I plan to play with mediawiki's API to see how far I can go.
- dhosek 6y ago
  The API stuff is nice. I wrote a Perl script back around '08 that read a MySQL schema and turned it into Mediawiki documentation. It was really handy for providing visibility into a database which had never been documented.
- jiggunjer 6y ago
  what kind of backups do you make, just regular database dumps?
  - znpy 6y ago
    I take a snapshot of the underlying zfs dataset.
qerim 6y ago
[Bookstack](https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/) has been working very well for us. Lots of great features and good UI. Also it integrates with LDAP and is open-source.
mro_name 6y ago
If you like low-tech https://dokuwiki.org https://dokuwiki.org (PHP, no-DB).
- aorth 6y ago
  Been using DokuWiki for personal worklog and team notes for ten years. Love it.
imglorp 6y ago
Has anyone used the GitHub wiki as part of a professional work group? Wondering how that went? If you're already using paid github it seems no brainer.
- arianvanp 6y ago
  We tried. But github search is such a joke that it's basically impossible to navigate; hence looking for something else now
  - marvinblum 6y ago
    Try Emvi [1]. We put a strong focus on search. [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    That's also been my experience. To be fair, most of today's search engines suck really bad. No exact match, no special symbols, no wildcards, etc. The power user had better tools at their disposal back in 1999.
adamsvystun 6y ago
The main problem with Outline is that it does not support collaborative editing. That's a deal-breaker (for our team at least).
- thenanyu 6y ago
  Hey hey — I'm an Outline contributor (OS, not part of the company). It's on the roadmap, a big part of the reason for a major recent rewrite of the underlying engine was to set up support for live collaborative editing.
neilv 6y ago
For a small startup team, we now simply do this as Markdown files in our monorepo. Some such Markdown files correspond 1:1 with code, and (for things like devops processes with a script component), are named the same, or with the same codename, often with just the filename extension differing. Other Markdown files have names like `ops/aws.md` and `20200713-foo-braindump-meeting-notes.md`. Normally, these are in the git main branch (unless some documentation addition/change is really tied to changes in a development branch). Just putting it in the repo means one fewer place people have to look (or not see) for important info. GitLab handles all the version-preserving, awareness of changes, etc. I usually use GitLab Web IDE for quick changes, and my favorite file editor for bigger changes. I do this after previously using wikis for key information, and decided that the monorepo is simpler, and seems more likely to be kept updated. (I previously loved wikis, and wrote an Emacs mode for one of the wikis when I used it at a well-known company, but I'm liking the monorepo approach even better for the current startup. https://www.neilvandyke.org/erin-twiki-emacs/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/erin-twiki-emacs/ )
dsr_ 6y ago
There are dozens of good open-source wikis available. Getting one set up is generally less than an hour's work. Getting people to contribute can be a problem, but if the workflow is easy and there are things to document, it will work out. Cleaning up after the fact is usually a bigger problem. Even with full-text search (a requirement, IMO) a large wiki can become a terrible dump. Library science is a real field, and if you can afford a librarian, you definitely want one.
- cborenstein 6y ago
  > Getting people to contribute can be a problem This is so spot on. and I don't think it even has to be a problem. The way people actually work is they 1) write a ton of private notes 2) share a small amount of these notes ad-hoc 3) publish a tiny amount of this to a wiki To make knowledge more available, the key is to streamline these steps. Building an app that's grounded in this workflow. Would love to hear the community's feedback on it. [0] https://bytebase.io https://bytebase.io
eugeniub 6y ago
I looked into self-hosted wikis for our team earlier this year. Outline looked very promising, but as the author here mentioned, the documentation was indeed lacking. It seemed to me that they're more intent on pushing their paid plans. Ultimately we landed on BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/) and people in our org love it. Deployment instructions were pretty easy to follow for someone who doesn't do many server deployments, the UI is great, and the feature set is sufficient for our needs. Plus, the lead developer is extremely helpful in answering questions on Discord.
- ssddanbrown 6y ago
  BookStack creator/lead dev here. Great to hear your users like the platform and that installation was smooth. Hope the platform works well for you going into the future.
  - npsomaratna 6y ago
    Thanks for creating such a great product. After trying (and being dissatisfied) with many different self-hosted Wikis, we stumbled on BookStack - and never looked back.
hacker_newz 6y ago
Why do you need slack for a wiki?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ishitatsuyuki 6y ago
I appreciated the design of Outline, until I looked at their website and found that... it's a complete rip-off of Notion? I've been using Notion for a while, and the commands/block mechanism has been bothering me the most. I don't think it's the way forward for WYSIWYG markup editors.
diego_moita 6y ago
> We experimented with TiddlyWiki. [...] But its non linear organization makes it super unintuitive and confusing. The main reason I like TiddlyWiki is precisely because it is so simple and easy to use.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Having used a variety of different self-hosted wiki platforms, I found that a self-hosted TiddlyWiki behind a server is perfect for my needs.
- pingpongchef 6y ago
  TiddlyWiki is ideal for a few scenarios I work on. 1. It's great as a notebook for organizing a creative endeavor like tabletop roleplaying. 2. Its tagging querying capabilities are robust. So robust that I've had success using it to tag media and run complex queries (e.g., select all items having tag1 and exclude items having tag2 and exclude items with value "value1" for key "key1") to where I can use it to manage media
etherio 6y ago
Interesting. I am currently building a personal self-hosted knowledge base program that uses ElasticSearch to find and organize your data but is also synced into your filesystem with markdown files. So you create a new file in your data/ dir and it will automatically create a new search index that you can view in the software's ui. It also allows you to have bookmarks where it actually downloads the contents of the bookmarked webpage to make sure it's preserved on your own system.
unixhero 6y ago
I for one have had a huge success for my private note taking as well as my own team's collaboration with BookStack. https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/
dlivingston 6y ago
Quite surprised it hasn't been mentioned here yet, but Wiki.js [0] is absolutely phenomenal. We use it in our research group as a team knowledge base, using LDAP authentication and scheduled backups to our GitLab instance. It's open source software that, in another era, we would have paid $10k for a license. [0]: https://wiki.js.org https://wiki.js.org
- ics 6y ago
  Has wiki-style linking been added yet? I gave it a trial run for several users and was baffled by the lack of linking features (short syntax, autocomplete of existing paths, highlight non-existent endpoints) which I consider part of the essential functionality of modern wiki software.
  - mekster 6y ago
    You can link to another page by selecting from the list of existing pages. Why do you want to link to a non existing page? You can create an empty page first and link to it.
- mekster 6y ago
  It's too bad the author doesn't demo the admin panel as I didn't figure out how good it was until I installed it myself recently.

115 points by chsasank 6y ago

Outline is proprietary software. https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE Also, are you saying it requires you to run Slack alongside? There are many good and free software wiki engines, I don't see why one would choose such a headache. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

chsasank 6y ago
I looked at BookStack, dokuwiki, mediawiki and multiple other open source wikis. None of them are as intuitive and easy to use as outline.
- chvid 6y ago
  I was just wondering how Outline made money / was intending to make money. This seems like an ok way to do things.
- waf 6y ago
  Did you look at wiki.js ( https://wiki.js.org/ https://wiki.js.org/ )? I've been evaluating wikis too, and that's at the top of my list because it checks the boxes of having a git backend, markdown, and third-party auth providers. Only downside is that it's NodeJS, which I'd rather not deal with given our existing tech stack, but as an internal app it should be fine.
  - chsasank 6y ago
    I did. It's interface is not as intuitive and streamlined as Outline. Our team found outline super intuitive because Outline's collections and Slack's channels are equivalent.
  - sdwolfz 6y ago
    I've installed wikijs for a small team of developers at their request. The biggest selling point for this piece of software, compared to showing them 5 other alternatives, is that it looks good, it's eye candy. And that is exactly what I've seen people want from software like these. They want to feel good when they open it and browse, they want to see a modern look, it makes the experience of using and maintaining a knowledge base more appealing so they engage more. Feature wise it's no confluence, nor xwiki, it's just a page editor with user management, but it's quick to set up, uses extreemely little memory by default, feels fast and looks good, so they don't mind if they see some functionality missing. Among more and more tools that I install for people I see this pattern where they are judged by their looks above features, and it's not easy for me to fully understand it... But then again I started learning and programming ruby for the same reason, it looked and felt good, so I stuck with it. So I guess the big takeaway here is not a large pepperoni pizza from domino's, but the fact that software looks matter, a lot, and it's probably going to matter more and more in the future.
    - waf 6y ago
      ah, interesting. I guess the implication in your comment is that there are other, more capable alternatives (but not as "pretty"). What are some of the criteria where wikijs is lacking? For me, wikijs was leading in all the criteria I mentioned in my original post.
    - mekster 6y ago
      What's not so easy to understand that the looks matter? I've gone through a list of wiki apps a few months ago as DokuWiki was showing its age, every time the demo page looked like some web from the 90's, I don't care what features it has but closed it instantly. I do full stack web but I make sure it's also visually pleasing for anything I build because there's no reason to give users eye pain. I'd rather think that anything that doesn't look good means the author had no time for visual adjustment as the internals still has a lot to be desired.
  - mekster 6y ago
    Second wiki.js. I've used DokuWiki for over a decade but it's showing its age. It's just a collection of hacks to add features and sometimes third party plugins are too buggy but wiki.js has most of what I wanted built-in. It had WYSIWYG editor. Frankly a bare markdown editor is out of the question as it is never intuitive for anyone but some techie who likes remembering all the tags and I'm s programmer for a long time but I'd take WYSIWYG any day for managing structured documents. It has plenty of auth targets from LDAP to oauth and many others. It doesn't force you with some weird rule such as "link first and create page" but just hit the "New page" button and since it has list of pages for both front side and the admin panel, you'll never have some page left in limbo. Admin panel is good. It lets you put custom CSS, so you can control the look pretty well including removing the parts you don't want. Custom navigation let's you add any links in the menu and access control is good, so it's easy to allow a group of people access certain pages. And it looks good. I'm just a user.
- slantyyz 6y ago
  Yeah, I did similar research as you and found that none of them were sticky enough for my uses. WikiJS came the closest, but it didn't feel 100% baked yet. I'm currently using Dropbox Paper as my pseudo-wiki, which is... OK until I find something better. For me, I like that Paper supports Markdown shortcuts (which for me personally, is the most important editor feature) and is minimalist.
  - wittyreference 6y ago
    I use Kiwi wiki on my phone, host the files on my dropbox, and access it via Sublime (with markdown add-ons) on my pc. I've also been experimenting with Obsidian, which so far looks like it might be better.
tommoor 6y ago
Slack or Google can be used as sign-in options, email can also be used once a team is created but not for the initial registration. There is a community PR that's being worked on to make the auth system a bit more pluggable, I'd link if GitHub was online.

techsupporter 6y ago

Unless I am remembering wrong (and the copy stored at the Internet Archive seems to agree with me[0]), you're not allowed to use the Outline source code for production use and you're definitely not allowed to use it in a way that lets third parties contribute to it. A non-free blob of software that requires integration with a definitely non-free separate service (Slack) that I can't also self-host doesn't sound all that attractive to someone (like me) who is interested in self-hosting. The software is pretty but those sparkly binds are a bit too tight. 0 - Had to check here since, as of writing, Github is under the weather: http://web.archive.org/web/20200614175138/https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE http://web.archive.org/web/20200614175138/https://github.com...

tommoor 6y ago
The BSL is meant to be open source "in spirit", with the sole restriction being that you can't run a competitive hosted service because that's the only way the project sustains itself. Internally hosting a copy for your own company is purposefully within the bounds of the license.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Not a lawyer, but that sounds a bit wishy-washy, which corporate lawyers are really not fond of. It's part of the reason why the JSON standard was problematic for a while, because it had a clause stating that it "should be used for Good, not Evil", which is a legal nightmare.
  - enjoylife 6y ago
    Ditto on the not a lawyer aspect, but this seems pretty straightforward: You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document Service. A “Document Service” is a commercial offering that allows third parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access the functionality of the Licensed Work by creating teams and documents controlled by such third parties.

greggman3 6y ago

2003-2006 my team used Lotus Notes as our team wiki. It was so much nicer than an actual wiki if only because there was a tree view on the left and it would highlight in bold anything that had been updated since you last read it. The tree view also let you see the entire content rather than just a random bunch of pages you might have to spider through to find things. Any wikis do that? Track individual reading? and which ones have the best non-techie UX where I can easily add images, diagrams, video, without having to jump through hoops?

tommoor 6y ago
I'd say Outline, almost fits the bill – individual read tracking is happening in the background but we don't yet surface that to the user – there's an open issue for this and it should get tackled soon, I'd link to GitHub if it wasn't down :)
eitland 6y ago
> Any wikis do that? Track individual reading? and which ones have the best non-techie UX where I can easily add images, diagrams, video, without having to jump through hoops? OneNote - while not a real wiki in my opinion - was close enough and could do this and I sometimes recommended it to Microsoft centric clients of mine. Now they are leaving the version I liked behind but some people might enjoy the new version.
- carlosf 6y ago
  I wish One Note allowed markdown blocks, I like how easy you can paste things like pictures and drawings, but it does not work well for stuff like code blocks.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Off the top of my mind tagging is also a weak spot (it insists on users using one of a number of defined tags, and while tags can be added it takes time and you also cannot type them out but have to rely on clumsy nested dropdows for all but the top 10 that can be reached via keyboard shortcuts.) I'm fairly certain there was more problems but all in all OneNote still used to be a good solutions for smaller companies that was stuck in Microsoft land anyway.

makethetick 6y ago

If you're already using Google docs internally then https://youneedawiki.com/ https://youneedawiki.com/ is a great front end for a quick and easy wiki

rglullis 6y ago

Others have already pointed out that outline is not really open source, so I will just link to the one alternative that worked for me as a self-hosted, open source (straight AGPL) alternative to Confluence: https://documize.com https://documize.com

mikro2nd 6y ago
Also worth noting that Outline's license seems to come from the future: Change Date: 2023-07-03
- vvillena 6y ago
  That's the date when the licensed software becomes GPL-compatible. That's the main feature of the BSL.

znpy 6y ago

I started using mediawiki as a personal knowledge base and it's working very well for me. Working with categories is still on the todo list for me, as I would like something similar to a tree-view, but I'm in no hurry. Also, I plan to play with mediawiki's API to see how far I can go.

dhosek 6y ago
The API stuff is nice. I wrote a Perl script back around '08 that read a MySQL schema and turned it into Mediawiki documentation. It was really handy for providing visibility into a database which had never been documented.
jiggunjer 6y ago
what kind of backups do you make, just regular database dumps?
- znpy 6y ago
  I take a snapshot of the underlying zfs dataset.

qerim 6y ago

[Bookstack](https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/) has been working very well for us. Lots of great features and good UI. Also it integrates with LDAP and is open-source.

mro_name 6y ago

If you like low-tech https://dokuwiki.org https://dokuwiki.org (PHP, no-DB).

aorth 6y ago
Been using DokuWiki for personal worklog and team notes for ten years. Love it.

imglorp 6y ago

Has anyone used the GitHub wiki as part of a professional work group? Wondering how that went? If you're already using paid github it seems no brainer.

arianvanp 6y ago
We tried. But github search is such a joke that it's basically impossible to navigate; hence looking for something else now
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Try Emvi [1]. We put a strong focus on search. [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/
- ravenstine 6y ago
  That's also been my experience. To be fair, most of today's search engines suck really bad. No exact match, no special symbols, no wildcards, etc. The power user had better tools at their disposal back in 1999.

adamsvystun 6y ago

The main problem with Outline is that it does not support collaborative editing. That's a deal-breaker (for our team at least).

thenanyu 6y ago
Hey hey — I'm an Outline contributor (OS, not part of the company). It's on the roadmap, a big part of the reason for a major recent rewrite of the underlying engine was to set up support for live collaborative editing.

neilv 6y ago

For a small startup team, we now simply do this as Markdown files in our monorepo. Some such Markdown files correspond 1:1 with code, and (for things like devops processes with a script component), are named the same, or with the same codename, often with just the filename extension differing. Other Markdown files have names like `ops/aws.md` and `20200713-foo-braindump-meeting-notes.md`. Normally, these are in the git main branch (unless some documentation addition/change is really tied to changes in a development branch). Just putting it in the repo means one fewer place people have to look (or not see) for important info. GitLab handles all the version-preserving, awareness of changes, etc. I usually use GitLab Web IDE for quick changes, and my favorite file editor for bigger changes. I do this after previously using wikis for key information, and decided that the monorepo is simpler, and seems more likely to be kept updated. (I previously loved wikis, and wrote an Emacs mode for one of the wikis when I used it at a well-known company, but I'm liking the monorepo approach even better for the current startup. https://www.neilvandyke.org/erin-twiki-emacs/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/erin-twiki-emacs/ )

dsr_ 6y ago

There are dozens of good open-source wikis available. Getting one set up is generally less than an hour's work. Getting people to contribute can be a problem, but if the workflow is easy and there are things to document, it will work out. Cleaning up after the fact is usually a bigger problem. Even with full-text search (a requirement, IMO) a large wiki can become a terrible dump. Library science is a real field, and if you can afford a librarian, you definitely want one.

cborenstein 6y ago
> Getting people to contribute can be a problem This is so spot on. and I don't think it even has to be a problem. The way people actually work is they 1) write a ton of private notes 2) share a small amount of these notes ad-hoc 3) publish a tiny amount of this to a wiki To make knowledge more available, the key is to streamline these steps. Building an app that's grounded in this workflow. Would love to hear the community's feedback on it. [0] https://bytebase.io https://bytebase.io

eugeniub 6y ago

I looked into self-hosted wikis for our team earlier this year. Outline looked very promising, but as the author here mentioned, the documentation was indeed lacking. It seemed to me that they're more intent on pushing their paid plans. Ultimately we landed on BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/) and people in our org love it. Deployment instructions were pretty easy to follow for someone who doesn't do many server deployments, the UI is great, and the feature set is sufficient for our needs. Plus, the lead developer is extremely helpful in answering questions on Discord.

ssddanbrown 6y ago
BookStack creator/lead dev here. Great to hear your users like the platform and that installation was smooth. Hope the platform works well for you going into the future.
- npsomaratna 6y ago
  Thanks for creating such a great product. After trying (and being dissatisfied) with many different self-hosted Wikis, we stumbled on BookStack - and never looked back.

hacker_newz 6y ago

Why do you need slack for a wiki?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ishitatsuyuki 6y ago

I appreciated the design of Outline, until I looked at their website and found that... it's a complete rip-off of Notion? I've been using Notion for a while, and the commands/block mechanism has been bothering me the most. I don't think it's the way forward for WYSIWYG markup editors.

diego_moita 6y ago

> We experimented with TiddlyWiki. [...] But its non linear organization makes it super unintuitive and confusing. The main reason I like TiddlyWiki is precisely because it is so simple and easy to use.

heavyset_go 6y ago
Having used a variety of different self-hosted wiki platforms, I found that a self-hosted TiddlyWiki behind a server is perfect for my needs.
pingpongchef 6y ago
TiddlyWiki is ideal for a few scenarios I work on. 1. It's great as a notebook for organizing a creative endeavor like tabletop roleplaying. 2. Its tagging querying capabilities are robust. So robust that I've had success using it to tag media and run complex queries (e.g., select all items having tag1 and exclude items having tag2 and exclude items with value "value1" for key "key1") to where I can use it to manage media

etherio 6y ago

Interesting. I am currently building a personal self-hosted knowledge base program that uses ElasticSearch to find and organize your data but is also synced into your filesystem with markdown files. So you create a new file in your data/ dir and it will automatically create a new search index that you can view in the software's ui. It also allows you to have bookmarks where it actually downloads the contents of the bookmarked webpage to make sure it's preserved on your own system.

unixhero 6y ago

I for one have had a huge success for my private note taking as well as my own team's collaboration with BookStack. https://www.bookstackapp.com/ https://www.bookstackapp.com/

dlivingston 6y ago

Quite surprised it hasn't been mentioned here yet, but Wiki.js [0] is absolutely phenomenal. We use it in our research group as a team knowledge base, using LDAP authentication and scheduled backups to our GitLab instance. It's open source software that, in another era, we would have paid $10k for a license. [0]: https://wiki.js.org https://wiki.js.org

ics 6y ago
Has wiki-style linking been added yet? I gave it a trial run for several users and was baffled by the lack of linking features (short syntax, autocomplete of existing paths, highlight non-existent endpoints) which I consider part of the essential functionality of modern wiki software.
- mekster 6y ago
  You can link to another page by selecting from the list of existing pages. Why do you want to link to a non existing page? You can create an empty page first and link to it.
mekster 6y ago
It's too bad the author doesn't demo the admin panel as I didn't figure out how good it was until I installed it myself recently.