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

Core features

Core features of the Engines include:

• Facility to publish content using quick and easy-to-create pages, including hyperlinks to other informational systems like people directories, CMS, applications, and thus to facilitate the buildup of useful knowledge bases.
• Facility to organize data. The Engines may 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.
• Facility to structure various 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.
• Facility to search relevant data, including previous revisions.

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. By their definition, those end-user applications that can be defined as open wikis can be used by organizations; however, not every enterprise wiki can be open to the general public.

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. Some merit basis is commonly used to promote users to upper levels.

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
Target audience	Public	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Private	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Corporate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Education	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Intranet	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Personal	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Scientific	Yes; built-in support for LaTeX math; syntax highlighting for code blocks	Unknown	Yes; built-in support for LaTeX math; syntax highlighting for code blocks; full HTML, JavaScript support	Yes, LaTex/MathML formulas (addons), Mind maps (addon), HTML (addon), syntax highlighting (addons), embed videos/maps (addons)	Yes; syntax highlighting for code blocks; Github-flavored Markdown syntax; full HTML; Images/Videos/Documents
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.

Influence on enterprise systems

Enterprise wikis may add to or replace centrally-managed data management systems, including:

• Content management systems. More contributors and editors allow for more rapid and cheap management of the enterprise content in comparison with a centrally controlled knowledge repository.
• Document management systems.
• Customer relationship management systems.
• Enterprise resource planning systems.
• Email software. Enterprise wikis may greatly reduce email overload.According to Wikipedia,

  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.

• Project management systems.

Features of enterprise wikis

Features of enterprise wikis are as wide as the wikis' applications. In contrast with open wikis, enterprise ones:

• Rarely allow all their viewers to access all the organizational knowledge. Users can be denied access to view and/or edit given pages, depending upon their department or role within the organization. For instance, only particular project team members are often allowed to access their project data and only those account managers who work with a particular customer can usually access his or her data.
• Are often either:
  1. Enhanced with additional functionalities such as workflow applications, access to file repositories, project management systems, etc.
  2. Integrated into other enterprise-wide systems.
• Rarely use any merit basis in order to promote users to upper levels of permissions. Those levels often follow an organizational hierarchy.

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
Target audience	Public
	Private	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Corporate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Education	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Intranet	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Personal	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Scientific	Yes; support for LaTeX math; syntax highlighting	Unknown	Unknown	Yes; support for LaTeX math; syntax highlighting	Yes
Category	Features	BlueSpice	Confluence	Redmine	Tiki	XWiki