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Future XWiki employee (should start in March!). Feel free to reach out to XWiki [1] [2], they'll be happy to answer your question and address your specific need

by jraph 5y ago

Future XWiki employee (should start in March!). Feel free to reach out to XWiki [1] [2], they'll be happy to answer your question and address your specific needs. They are nice. Feel free to contact me if you'd prefer but I'll be less competent than them for obvious reasons. I don't know many things about XWiki yet, but the main difference between MediaWiki and XWiki is probably the X in XWiki (eXtensible). XWiki is more like a development platform to build a website, a blog, or a collaborative platform (internal or public) that you can tailor to your needs. What you put as contents is highly customizable / scriptable and several Wiki syntaxes are supported. The XWiki syntax can be extended to support your custom features if needed. There are a lot of apps [3] to extend XWiki (some are paid, but open source anyway so you can compile them yourself). LDAP is supported. XWiki will also provide support or specific developments if needed. MediaWiki is developed for Wikipedia first. That's what you can read on XWiki's website anyway. But if you don't need anything that MediaWiki doesn't already provide and like its UX, it can't be a wrong decision to go for it. Many people outside Wikimedia use it and the UX is familiar to everybody, and that's huge. Both tools can be self hosted (and MediaWiki is quite easy to install), MediaWiki is mostly in PHP, XWiki is in Java. XWiki can be hosted for you by XWiki SAS. They'll also help handle migrations from Confluence and are currently handling a lot of them, and I'm sure they will be interested by hearing about migrations from other tools too. I guess WikiMatrix would be a good starting point [4]. XWiki also have comparisons to common collaborative platforms on their websites including MediaWiki. They are obviously biased, but don't lie neither. You might want to check them out. I hadn't encountered Bookstack, before. The UI seems quite clean. I hope we'll have the pleasure to meet and discuss at some point! The UK is not far, we are neighbors. Hmm, neighbours! edit: by the way, you might be interested by XWiki's online presentation at FOSDEM on the 5th of February [5], as well as any other presentation in the collaboration and content management devroom, because not everything collaboration is a wiki :-) [6] [1] https://www.xwiki.org/ https://www.xwiki.org/ [2] https://www.xwiki.com/ https://www.xwiki.com/ [3] https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/products/business-apps [4] https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+bookstack https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/moinmoin+mediawiki+xwiki+... [5] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/collabxwiki/ [6] https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_content_management/ https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/collaboration_and_con...

zozbot234 5y ago
There is a "semantic" extension to MediaWiki that makes it easier to support many enterprise use cases with data visualizations, custom queries (potentially referencing information from multiple wiki pages) and the like. It is somewhat widely used for wikis other than Wikipedia, that can simply defer to the Wikidata project for those needs.
- jraph 5y ago
  I didn't know! Linking for whoever would like to look into this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
- RheingoldRiver 5y ago
  SMW works okay but if you have technical ability, I'd recommend Cargo (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo) instead. It's a somewhat limited SQL wrapper (limited - e.g. subqueries aren't supported, which can be annoying on occasion but tbh I've only missed them maybe 3 or 4 times, wiki queries tend not to be too complicated) which is roughly equivalent to SMW in maybe 50% of use cases I've encountered, inferior in maybe 2%, and significantly better in the rest. It definitely has a bit of a higher learning curve than SMW, especially for non-developers, and even for developers there's some kinda weird stuff going on with it (e.g. they have this HOLDS syntax sugar and list-type fields as an answer to SMW's ability to express one-to-many relations a bit more naturally than sql can; also there's this cargo_attach parser function that I forget to do 80% of the time and that's why my tables don't rebuild properly). Anyway if anyone does use MediaWiki and is choosing between these extensions I'm happy to talk to you about them, this is what I do for my job & I have several years experience with both (though my SMW experience is somewhat outdated, since I switched to Cargo several years ago, and only recently have started using SMW again, and that only tangentially).

by jraph 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

There is a "semantic" extension to MediaWiki that makes it easier to support many enterprise use cases with data visualizations, custom queries (potentially referencing information from multiple wiki pages) and the like. It is somewhat widely used for wikis other than Wikipedia, that can simply defer to the Wikidata project for those needs.

jraph 5y ago
I didn't know! Linking for whoever would like to look into this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
RheingoldRiver 5y ago
SMW works okay but if you have technical ability, I'd recommend Cargo (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo) instead. It's a somewhat limited SQL wrapper (limited - e.g. subqueries aren't supported, which can be annoying on occasion but tbh I've only missed them maybe 3 or 4 times, wiki queries tend not to be too complicated) which is roughly equivalent to SMW in maybe 50% of use cases I've encountered, inferior in maybe 2%, and significantly better in the rest. It definitely has a bit of a higher learning curve than SMW, especially for non-developers, and even for developers there's some kinda weird stuff going on with it (e.g. they have this HOLDS syntax sugar and list-type fields as an answer to SMW's ability to express one-to-many relations a bit more naturally than sql can; also there's this cargo_attach parser function that I forget to do 80% of the time and that's why my tables don't rebuild properly). Anyway if anyone does use MediaWiki and is choosing between these extensions I'm happy to talk to you about them, this is what I do for my job & I have several years experience with both (though my SMW experience is somewhat outdated, since I switched to Cargo several years ago, and only recently have started using SMW again, and that only tangentially).