Wiki engine

Any wiki engine (hereinafter, the Engine) is software that is designed to support creation, collaborative editing, storage, and usage of hyper-linked documents. The editing usually occurs through a web browser. The Engine that is ready to be installed is called wiki software; the Engine that is installed, usually on one or more application servers, is called a wiki application.

Usage

Collaboration tool

Main wikipage: Document collaboration

Theoretically, any collaborative development of documents can occur in four ways:

#	Collaborative document development	Tools	Advantages	Disadvantages
1	Exchange of ideas and compiling a unified document	Forums, brainstorming sessions, interpersonal communications such as emails	Tools are commonly known and can be used by pretty much anyone	Compiling a unified document can be very challenging; usually, it needs to be collaborated beyond its ideas exchange
2	Exchange of documents under development	Systems to pass documents physically or as email attachments		If more than two collaborate, identifying the last revisions can be challenging.
3	Collaborative work on the same document without tracking of its revisions.	Web-based office suites such as Google Docs; document storage facilities such as Google Drive; workflow applications; content management systems	Although minimal skills are required to utilize the tools, usually, everyone can obtain those skills	The main drawback arises if the history of revisions is needed
4	Collaborative work on the same document with tracking of its revisions.	The Engines	Under some circumstances, too much information can be difficult to handle	The tools require skills beyond minimal

Version control

All the most popular Engines include some version control systems (VCSes) in one of two ways:

1. MediaWiki, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Wiki.js, XWiki, etc. track revisions using their database management systems (DBMSes).
2. Gitit and Ikiwiki use their VCSes to store files without any standalone database. A default version of PmWiki features no database as well, but can utilize some database through some plugins.

Areas of applications

Essentially, all the Engines can fall into one or more categories:

• Publicly-open wikis such as MediaWiki and PmWiki, which are fully visible to any user of the World Wide Web and feature potentially large communities of readers, content contributors, and editors.
• Enterprise wikis, which feature either:
  1. Fully-private documents for data management utilized by organizations or private teams. Confluence and the wiki component of Redmine belong to this type of the Engines.
  2. Some combination of private and publicly-open documents particularly practiced by Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and Liferay. Often, private documents are used to develop publicly-open ones.
• Personal wikis such as TiddlyWiki, which are designed to be used by a single person to manage notes and usually be run on a personal device such as a desktop computer or mobile phone.

Publicly-open wikis

Publicly-open wikis such as MediaWiki and PmWiki which are fully visible to any user of the World Wide Web and feature potentially large communities of readers, content contributors, and editors.

Features of open wikis

Since open wikis tend to attract large communities of content contributors and editors, they usually allow for open registration, which arises needs to combat spam. Several levels of user permissions are usually set up in order to manually manage users and the content, especially the one in dispute.

Open-wiki trends

MediaWiki is the most popular open-wiki Engine; it features a resilient back-end, but its front-end appearance, especially limited mobile-friendliness, and text editor are lagging behind such industry standards such established by WordPress, for instance. Several projects such as BlueSpice MediaWiki, PmWiki, and Wiki.js aim to address those weaknesses of MediaWiki.

Comparison of open wikis

Comparison of open wikis

Category	Features	Gitit	Ikiwiki	MediaWiki	PmWiki	Wiki.js
Legal properties	Ownership	OSS	OSS	OSS	OSS	OSS
	Developer	John MacFarlane	Joey Hess	Magnus Manske, Lee Daniel Crocker	Patrick Michaud	Nicolas Giard
	License	GPL	GPLv2	GPLv2	GPL	Affero
	Latest release	0.12.3.1	3.20190228	1.33.0	2.2.118	1.0.117
History		2019/01/01	2019/02/28	2019/07/02	2019/08/28	2019/01/22
	Introduction	2008	2006	2002	2002	2017
OS	Windows	No	Yes	Cross-platform	Cross-platform	Cross-platform
	macOS	No	Yes
	Linux	UNIX-like	No
	BSD		No
	Unix		No
Core	Encoding	UTF-8	Unknown	UTF-8	ISO8859-1, UTF-8	UTF-8
	Multilingual support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Programming language	Haskell	Perl	PHP	PHP	JavaScript
	Data backend	Git, Darcs, Mercurial	VCS	MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL	Flat-file, SQLite (via plug-in)	Node.js, MongoDB, Git
Category	Features	Gitit	Ikiwiki	MediaWiki	PmWiki	Wiki.js

Enterprise wikis

Enterprise wikis are designed to be used in organizations, usually, as (a) an internal knowledge base and/or (b) internal tool to develop textual documents, particularly external webpages. According to Wikipedia,

Among the many companies and government organizations that use wikis internally are Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Intel, Microsoft, and the United States intelligence community.

It tends to have a greater emphasis on features like access control, integration with other software, and document management. Most proprietary wiki applications specifically market themselves as enterprise solutions, including Confluence, Socialtext, Jive, Traction TeamPage, and Nuclino. In addition, some open source wiki applications also describe themselves as enterprise solutions, including XWiki, Foswiki[5] and TWiki.[6] Some open-source wiki applications, though they do not specifically bill themselves as enterprise solutions, have marketing materials geared for enterprise users, like Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware[7] and MediaWiki.[8] Many other wiki applications have also been used within enterprises.

Within organizations, wikis may either add to or replace centrally managed content management systems. Their decentralized nature allows them, in principle, to disseminate needed information across an organization more rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository. Wikis can also be used for document management, project management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and many other kinds of data management.

Features of enterprise wikis

Features of wikis which can serve an enterprise include:

   Entering information into quick and easy-to-create pages, including hyperlinks to other corporate information systems like people directories, CMS, applications, and thus to facilitate the buildup of useful knowledge bases.
   Reduces e-mail overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Conversely, only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden subscribers with many messages, regardless of their relevance. It is also very useful for the project manager to have all the communication stored in one place, which allows them to link the responsibility for every action taken to a particular team member.
   Organizes information. Wikis help users structure information into discoverable and searchable categories. These may arise from users in a bottom-up way. Users can create lists, tables, timelines and other ways of expressing order.
   Builds consensus. Wikis allow structuring the expression of views, on a topic being considered by authors, on the same page. This feature is very useful when writing documentation, preparing presentations, when author opinions differ, and so on.
   Access levels by rights and roles. Users can be denied access to view and/or edit given pages, depending upon their department or role within the organization.
   Knowledge management with comprehensive searches. This includes document management, project management, and knowledge repositories useful during times of employee turnover or retirement.

Comparison of enterprise wikis

Comparison of enterprise wikis

Category	Features	BlueSpice	Confluence	Redmine	Tiki	XWiki
Legal properties	Ownership	OSS	Atlassian	OSS	OSS	OSS
	Developer	Hallo Welt! GmbH		Jean-Philippe Lang	Luis Argerich	Ludovic Dubost
	License	GPLv3	Proprietary	GPLv2	LGPL	LGPL
	Latest release	3.0.1	6.15.6	4.0.4	19.1	11.7
History		2019/01/17	2019/06/24	2019/6/10	2019/02/14	2019/08/27
	Introduction	2011	2004	2006	2002	2004
OS	Windows	No	Yes	Cross-platform	Cross-platform	Cross-platform
	macOS	No	Yes
	Linux	UNIX-like	No
	BSD		No
	Unix		No
Core	Encoding	UTF-8	UTF-8	Unknown	UTF-8	UTF-8
	Multilingual support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Programming language	PHP	Java, Java EE	Ruby	PHP	Java
	Data backend	MariaDB	DB2, MS SQL Server, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL	Cross-database	MariaDB	PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Apache Derby, HSQLDB
Category	Features	BlueSpice	Confluence	Redmine	Tiki	XWiki