cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nocturnal.garden/post/552459

For a hobby of mine, there’s an outdated lore wiki on Fandom. I dislike Fandom and would like to host an alternative. It’s supposed to be accessible to all kinds of people.

I started with mediawiki as that’s what Fandom and Wikipedia are using, so people would be familiar with page structures at least and maybe the editor.

It turned out to be a bit of a pain though. It only has unofficial container images, the documentation is outdated and (what I consider as) core functionality like WYSIWYG editor or simple infoboxes has to be added by extensions or templates. I’m in the process of setting it all up and wondering if it’s worth it (and if I want to maintain it). There’s so many wiki projects it’s hard to keep track, what are y’all using for stuff that’s used by larger communities and simple to use with close-to-default settings?

  • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    I use Dokuwiki for my small fantasy wiki project. I use many plugins to achieve the functionality and style that I want, but it works well for my needs. None of the others I looked at could do quite everything I wanted.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I’m currently migrating my worldbuilding and conlanging project to Dokuwiki. Right now I have an Obsidian vault used for brainstorming and drafting and a public Mediawiki for stuff I feel is worth showing off. Like Obsidian, DW stores everything as plaintext (it’s not markdown but it’s readable and the tables are better IMO). Like Mediawiki, DW keeps a version history so I can keep track of how my ideas evolve over time, which is crucial for conlang documentation. I keep tons of example texts that may reflect earlier phases of the grammar and vocab that I may need to reference. Unlike both Obsidian and MW, Dokuwiki has access control, so I can keep a private namespace for drafts and a public namespace for stuff I think is polished enough to show.

      I’m not sure DW meet’s OP’s requirements for “out of the box” functionality though. I think it’s intended to be rather bare bones but be very easy to extend with plugins. The plugin browser is built in, so customization is a breeze. Plugins can be individually installed, enabled, disabled, and updated through the admin GUI.

      • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        If you wouldn’t mind sharing, I’d love to take a gander at what you’re cooking up!

          • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
            1·
            16 hours ago

            Not at all! I did poke around some random pages after you helped me, sorry I didn’t come back to my. Thanks for sharing the update, I’m keen to see how you’re using DW.

            • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              12 hours ago

              Judging by how productive I’ve been just in the last 8 hours, I’d say going from Mediawiki to Dokuwiki was a good choice. I’m not even sure why. DW still uses markup instead of a WYSIWYG editor, which I’m fine with. I think it’s the namespaces. MW does have them, but you have to set them up with a config file on the server, and adding and removing them cannot be done lightly. With DW it’s as easy as searching for new_namespace:some_new_article, and the namespace is created along with the article. So I have a scratchpad namespace where I can work on drafts, a stories namespace to put my attempts at creative writing, a lore namespace for, well, canonized lore tidbits, and so on. And I don’t need to worry about names colliding like I did with MW where lore articles and story titles often conflicted.

              DW lets you use hierarchy when it works, and loose categories (tags) when it doesn’t (with the tags plugin that is). With MW you just have categories but no hierarchy. Bookstack is the opposite. It forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. It does have tags, too, but you can’t have pages outside of books, and the pages have an explicit order. You can fairly easily change that order, but it’s always there.

              Back to DokuWiki, the blog plugin has proven invaluable over the last few days. I can jot down ideas as blog entries and push them to the main lore namespace if I think they’re worth keeping.

        • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          The DW instance isn’t public (yet) but here’s a link to the currently public mediawiki instance.

          https://constructed.world/

          I never invested the time to make the content very discoverable, so you’ll have to make copious use of the random page and what links here features if you want to see what I’ve written.

          Enjoy my stress-induced maladaptive daydreams.

          • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            Thanks for sharing! I don’t have a ton of experience with MediaWiki and cannot figure out how to go to a random page lol

            • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              It’s behind the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines on the top left of the page), at least with the latest default skin. You can also check out a list of all pages by searching Special:AllPages, and a list of all categories with special:categories The categories will in turn take you to lists of pages tagged with that category. It’s great for going on wiki walks.

      • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
        3·
        7 days ago

        I considered functions that I wanted (for example, tags) and looked to see if there was a plugin that did what I wanted. Dokuwiki’s plugin browser was very useful for this.