LinkedIn Questions and Answers truly rocks!

LinkedIn Questions and Answers truly rocks!

Last night I had a question about which wiki technology should I put more resources behind: TWiki or MediaWiki, so I decided to give a shot at the LinkedIn Answers feature.... (specifically I am the point now with the EULA project where I want to break all of the rights and issues of the EULA into sub-pages on a wiki).

I posted: * ** Does anyone have an opinion of MediaWiki (the Wiki behind Wikipedia) vs. TWiki? I am assuming that MediaWiki is much more feature rich, but at what cost in speed? Or does it matter because MediaWiki has the runaway mind share and it is better to go ahead and get behind the winner (if indeed MediaWiki is the winner?)

*And now 12 hours later I have 17 emails from professionals all over the world in onlinge games / new media / software development who have direct experience with one of the two wikis or another, and even better many of them have already done this direct comparison before! This is truly fantastic, it made me excited again to alive today with all of this networked knowledge, it is an addictive and empowering experience of how we are all accelerating each other other's progress to our goals!

Here is the key response:

http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/MediaWiki+TWiki

I am favoring the syntax of TWiki at the moment... slightly more elegant I think

Here are some of the other great responses:

mediawiki is the way...but, twiki has a wysiwyg editor...I still think mediawiki is best because of aforementioned communities support, way larger active developer base, etc... FROM JP

MediaWiki has the mindshare and most likely people will know how to use it due to it being by far the most widely used Wiki publicly. I don't believe speed is a difference point. Clive may have a different opinion, but TWiki seems to be more used for internal product development purposes rather than externally facing sites. What is gopets trying to do? -B at S.com

Media wiki - end user wiki provides a simple consistent way for users to work with it. It has nice WYSIWYG editors Twiki - engineering wiki should be used for developing processes. The idea is your find out what works for your situation and then use its powerful configuration features to tailor a twiki to fit you process. C at S.com

Not sure Erik. Every time we looked into or installed a wiki other than MediaWiki, we realized it wasn't as good. We use MediaWiki for everything and no one complains (not even the artists!). CC

We use MediaWiki for our internal documentation. The only other wiki-style system I've used is phpWiki, which was terrible in comparison. The site is internal so we don't have a lot of demand on the system, but from what I've heard pretty much every other wiki system is faster than both MediaWiki and Twiki. Check out http://www.wikimatrix.org/ or google something like "wiki comparison" that might help. I did a casual search way back and decided on MediaWiki, but that was mostly based on its popularity and our intended usage. PS

MediaWiki has a heavy bias towards openness - this translates into weak Access Control in terms of Grouping Users and segmenting content. So, if you want a page to display certain content to employees or partners but not to customers, or to customers but to guest visitors, or content for just one customer, MediaWiki is more problematic - there are ways around, but that's how you deal with it. To the plus, you can know that the code is robust - it runs one of the largest sites on the www.

TWiki is oriented to Commercial Uses. It has better access control features. It uses flat files and rcs (sccs?) version control. Possibly more commercial types of extensions have been published for it. It's Markup Language is more obtuse and complicated.

I'm a MediaWiki user. Either are a good choice - and free. If you must pay - Atlassian's Confluence is a good choice. Also, check out Wikipatterns: http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns From DJ

We actually switched all of our internal Wikis (something like 14 of them for different aspects of different projects!) from MediaWiki to Twiki. I think the Twiki interface is easier to edit with, though everyone's already familiar with MediaWiki, which is a big plus.

MediaWiki just isn't set up to allow for the different access controls we wanted and maintaining all those separate wikis was annoying. With Twiki we have only one install to maintain since all the wikis can operate safely within the Twiki structure. -MM

 	I find that people know how to navigate and use MediaWiki the best because everyone knows about wikipedia! -JM

We did an internal survey, between MediaWiki and Twiki, focused on video game production needs - The mains results are in the favor of MediaWiki for registration process, UI, accessibility and advanced features. Even if there are still improvments to do around FireFox Compatibility, Live File Uploading and Pictures Management Options (solved with some extensions) - We noticed some points to improve in MediaWiki such as Wysiwyg, Help Files and Notification System. For sure MediaWiki works better for us as everybody have the Wikipedia experience ;) -JM2

I've worked on a variety of flavors of Wiki, and have found TWiki and MediaWiki to be the most savory. I don't think there is any appreciable difference in speed, and they both scale fairly well. I think they are very distinct, so it would be an investment to move from one to the other, so I probably wouldn't move from one to the other if I have an existing solution.

Were I on some of the very not flavorful varieties of Wiki, I'd move to the Wiki type my internal team had the most experience with. All things being equal, I'd go with MediaWiki just because I believe (no actual evidence, just Wikipedia's existence) that more people are familiar with its interface. -CO

MediaWiki is designed to be a public wiki and access control of any sort was an afterthought. While it is easy to install and maintain, the structure is very fluid and can go out of control with time. Suitable where you need this to be editable by a large number of users with the same level of access control. Similar wikis include DokuWiki.

TWiki is a very structured wiki. You can enforce multiple levels of access control. However, this can be more difficult to install and maintain than MediaWiki. TWiki has a large number of plugins which can add/modify features. More suitable for scenarios where you have a relatively smaller number of users with granular permissions and primarily used as a corporate/project wiki.

You should also look at other wikis like MoinMoin, SocialText, Confluence, etc.

Links: http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ http://www.socialtext.com/ http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

From SD

I've had a lot of experience with MediaWiki, and only one experience with TWiki. Coming from MediaWiki I found the TWiki markup a bit strange to use, and in general always felt a bit lost in it. I'm sure a lot of that is simply a matter of not being as familiar with TWiki, but that probably answers your question all the same. -BR

I've had no speed and feature problems with MediaWiki. Use it. It's a real live project so it's often updated and improved. An installation is awesome simple.

Of course You can have barriers with combining it with some other technologies. E.g. if you need to add wiki to existing project and want to use your own Users System (registration, singing, singingout, etc..). -VB

 	Hi Erik!  I have only used MediaWiki which might not answer your question but speaks to the mind share component. : ) -KP

Hi Erik,i dont know if you are interested but you could maybe give Sharepoint 3 a try? It comes with a Wiki and it is very easy to use = acceptance within our company is higher than MediaWiki. Also it has a nice WYSIWYG editor and you can format your text very nice and easy. Sharepoint Services is also free. We use it since its release and before that we had MediaWiki. -FF

-Erik

Originally posted on LiveJournal