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For a hobby of mine, there’s an outdated lore wiki on Fandom.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 It only has unofficial container images, the documentation is outdated and (what I consider as) core functionality like WYSIWYG editor or simple infoboxes has to be added by extensions or templates.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?

  • 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.