Wiki KnowledgeBase

July 13, 2004 5:32 PM

I am looking for a Wiki engine for a corporate knowledge-base; I've tried a few already, and I am discouraged by the selection so far. Recommendations? (more inside, of course)

I've already tried Tiki Wiki and Mediawiki (the latter's the engine behind Wikipedia). Tiki has everything anybody could hope for, but I've found it a bit slow, and its URLs are too ugly for my tastes. Mediawiki is very clean and pretty but doesn't seem to have any decent access control (e.g. anonymous users are able to read everything, as far as I can tell). I've also looked into Moin Moin, but haven't tried it yet.

Besides access control, I'd like the abililty to display math formulas via TeX and attach files to pages (and yeah, clean URLs).

posted by costas to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Nore: If you have mod_rewrite access on your server/Web hosting, then you can solve any URL ugliness problems with a couple of lines of code. For example, you can seamlessly have something like http://yoursite.com/test.html dynamically turn into http://yoursite.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?subject=test without anyone knowing a thing :-)
posted by wackybrit at 6:30 PM on July 13, 2004

Some previous AskMe queries that might help:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
posted by obloquy at 6:37 PM on July 13, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, obloquy... most of those threads were on personal wikis though...
posted by costas at 6:51 PM on July 13, 2004

The only wiki software that I've played with that has any sort of decent access control was TWiki. With some modifications, you can hook it up to do standard authentication (on *nix systems), but it's sort of an all or nothing kind of deal. You can a) allow anyone to edit or b) allow only registered users to edit. You can refine it a little bit, but it's not terribly easy to configure. However, other than mediawiki (what Wikipedia uses), I've found that it's one of the most complete wiki engines. There's also many plugins available for extending its functionality, and is very actively developed.
posted by misterioso at 9:00 PM on July 13, 2004

Take a look at Zwiki, a wiki engine for Zope. It has the core features you're asking for (fine grained security, clean URLs, links to attachments, etc.).

Plus, there's a version of it called LatexWiki that allows for inline Tex.

The learning curve on Zope can be steep, but with knowledge of the basics you can get a full zwiki up and running on windows or linux in about 10 minutes (including download time). Feel free to email me if you have questions...
posted by kaefer at 10:49 PM on July 13, 2004

I haven't actually installed it but I here that The Everything Development Engine is extrememly flexible to the point of insanity.

I frequently use it in a highly modified form at Everything2.com as part of an encyclopedia meets writing experiment meets text adventure meets role-playing game.

The way you can arrange and sort information and track logical links between bits of information is quite addictive and useful, all while maintaining an easy to use user-created data interface/front end.
posted by loquacious at 3:20 AM on July 14, 2004