Mediawiki vs. Gollum vs ...

[Thomas Koch]

David Nadlinger wrote:
> I still think Mediawiki is the better choice than Gollum if we
> want a full-fledged wiki. As far as I can see it, a large part of
> the dissatisfaction with the current wiki is precisely that it
> doesn't support many of the convenient features people have come
> to expect from modern wiki software. But Gollum seems to support
> even less features than the prowiki.org software.

Hi David,

as I said, I don't have a strong opinion here. I'd add "watched pages" as a 
missing feature in Gollum. On the other hand I've not yet found a solution 
to clone the content of a Mediawiki instance for offline reading and backup. 
(I'd much appreciate hints!)

The only show stopper of Mediawiki would be, if there was nobody to host and 
maintain it for D. Can you recommend a Mediawiki hosting service?

I'm a contributor to several Mediawiki instances myself and even while I'm 
hating PHP with a passion I'd still consider it for non-technical topics.

> For example, Andrej mentioned above how annoying it was that the
> prowiki.org search doesn't work properly. Well, Gollum as running
> on github.com doesn't seem to support search at all!
I could live without search. If I need it, I use Google with the "site:" 
parameter to search only the wiki.

> Or take user management: MediaWiki supports an extensive set of
> tools for setting permission, banning users, protecting pages,
> etc., which is proven to work in the real world. On the other
> hand, I don't think that Gollum, due to its nature, supports any
> kind of access control besides restricting wiki access to, in our
> case, d-programming-language.org contributors. This is a problem
> because an important part of the wiki concept is that everybody
> can edit all/most of the pages, _without_ prior review. For this
> to work, you also need to be able to take measures against
> vandalism.
There are two options: Only contributors can edit or everybody with a github 
account can edit. Only the latter makes sense for us. Public editing without 
a github account is not possile (AFAIK). The restriction to github accounts 
should provide sufficient protection against spam.

Best regards,

Thomas Koch