SlimWiki – Beautiful Wikis for Teams

This looks pretty good. I'm helping look for a simple, nontechincal-person-compatible wiki system at work[0].

We were going to go with Hackpad, but then Dropbox bought them. (Still might, but Dropbox makes us uncomfortable, and Hackpad's official Twitter account stated last year that they are 'no longer actively developing Hackpad'[1]... presumably because they are now developing the still-unrelease Dropbox Notes?

Slimwiki was on HN before[2], 410 ago, when it was apparently new. So that answered my first question, "How long has this been around?" Looks like it was released in 2014.

The more important question about any system you are going to be dumping your business knowledge into and investing time in curating is, of course, "How long will this be around?"

Much harder to know, and the Slimwiki website does nothing to reassure me that it won't disappear when Jan Jones, the high school senior who made it for his class project, moves out of his parents' basement and goes off to college.[3]

Cool things about it in my 10-minute test drive:

1. Clean & attractive editing experience

2. Attach any arbitrary attachment and store it inside the wiki

3. Choose which AWS region you want backing your wiki (very important in Japan, where "Asia Pacific (Tokyo)" tends to offer a hundred times faster throughput and 1% of the latency of say, "US East (N. Virginia)"

Non-good things:

1. no simultaneous multiple editing like Hackpad, Google Docs, etc.

2. need to manually save changes, and to add insult to injury the 'delete all these changes' button is 2 pixels away from the 'save changes' button (yes I managed to nuke my edits in my first ten minutes using it)

All in all, looks neat, and this is after test-driving the dozen or so most-recommended wiki systems (self-hosted or otherwise).

[0]: A horrid, painful ordeal — there are many, many terrible wiki systems in the world.

[1]: https://twitter.com/hackpad/status/506859732221829120

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008926

[3]: Not saying that is the case here, just that the website doesn't really do anything to make me think it isn't.