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Comment by RheingoldRiver | Hacker News Reader

Most people know about MediaWiki even if they don't realize they do, because it powers Wikipedia, but I wish more people used it for documentation.

You can create highly specialized templates in Lua, and there's a RDBMS extension called Cargo that gives you some limited SQL ability too. With these tools you can build basically an entirely custom CMS on top of the base MW software, while retaining everything that's great about MW (easy page history, anyone can start editing including with a WYSIWYG editor, really fine-grained permissions control across user groups, a fantastic API for automated edits).

It doesn't have the range of plugins to external services the way something like Confluence has, but you can host it yourself and have a great platform for documentation.

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Mediawiki is huge and very complex. Why not something more simple like instiki?

Personally I would prefer a wiki with git backend. I wrote one [1] but I dont recommend using it.

https://github.com/entropie/oy

Fossil, the bespoke VCS used by sqlite includes a wiki & web server out of the box. It's not normally what people think of in this domain but I've used it for that purpose and it works great for it. https://fossil-scm.org

This is really cool. Thanks for pointing to it.

How about docusaurus and tinasaurus? The latter is based on TinaCMS.

[1] Docusaurus:

https://docusaurus.io/

[2] Tinasaurus:

https://github.com/tinacms/tinasaurus

This arent wikis..?

Yes, while technically speaking they are not wiki in traditional sense, they are based on Git thus collaborative editing is feasible and combined with friendly interface of TinaCMS in which Tinasaurus is based on, it can be a modern Wiki version on steroid i.e lean and fast wiki

It is a PITA from an ops point of view unless you use vanilla with no extensions. Each upgrade tends to break a bunch of extensions and you have to hunt around for solutions.

Isn't that only a problem if the extensions you use are third-party? If you use 100 different extensions, but they're all ones Wikipedia uses too, won't you be fine?

Probably.

Like any documentation system, its success depends on its audience.

As an administrator, I wish MediaWiki had a built-in updater (bonus points if it could be automated).

> As an administrator, I wish MediaWiki had a built-in updater (bonus points if it could be automated).

I get that by using the container distributions. I just mount My LocalSettings.php and storage volumes in the appropriate places and I get a new version.

And since I run on ZFS and i take a snapshot before updating if something goes wrong I can rollback the snapshot, and go back to when stuff just worked (and retry later).

I think it's passe. These days I'd suggest something comparable to Notion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/16zon95/are_there_a...

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