Choice of wiki (Re: [gnome-women] Um, where is the G-W wiki?)

[Mary Gardiner <mary-gnome puzzling org>]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> The VNOSS wiki uses wakkawiki (wikini?) [3], and the Translate Wiki  
> [4] uses dokuwiki, because it also handles UTF-8 well, and I really  
> find its interface the easiest to read, and to use. I'll try to find  
> out if moinmoin has a similar approach to translation ... but I  
> personally find its interface non-intuitive and hard to read, so I'm  
> having trouble feeling enthusiastic about it. I wonder how committed  
> the Gnome Live admins are to their wiki software... ;)

As I understand it, MoinMoin is usually chosen because it is written in
the programming language Python. This has a few calls on people: there
are a lot of people who like Python, and Python (among others) is seen
as more secure than PHP, which many wikis are written in.

I actually really dislike MoinMoin as a user (I don't know about it as
an administrator or developer). I much prefer MediaWiki (which is in
PHP), the wiki software used for Wikipedia et al, which has a saner
markup, fewer i18n bugs, a more open development community and a few
other things.

However, it unfortunately tends to be pretty hard to switch an active
wiki to new software. Most wikis use their own custom varient version of
wiki markup (MoinMoin and MediaWiki markup is pretty different), and
store their data in incompatible formats. You are therefore locked into
your choice of wiki to some extent. I don't know how long the GNOME Live
one has been around... probably long enough to have this effect.

-Mary