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Comment on Ask HN: Which Wiki or internal documentation tools do you use?

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I'd be curious if anyone can summarize the tradeoffs between Confluence + MediaWiki at some point. From what I've seen it seems to come down to:

(1) MediaWiki is definitely more responsive (Confluence can be quite slow) and, importantly, considerably more expressive -- provide you can learn Markdown, which basically anyone can.

(2) But you're essentially stuck with email-based logins which can be a dealbreaker to some organizations (MW does support OAuth in theory, but only in theory it seems -- the setup seems to be basically not supported).

I find that the admin side of Mediawiki is downright painful. Installing plugins requires mucking around in a config file on the server (it’s just another PHP app), and any errors in that file lead to a blank white page, rather than a useful error message.

I also found scaling MW harder than Confluence, as unintuitive as that sounds. Same goes for troubleshooting speed problems.

Good to know - thanks

I'll give it a shot, but I am the entire IT/DevOps/pe department for my company. It boils down to one thing: hosted so I don't have to do shite. Along with the fact that we use bitbucket, so peeps are already logged on, this makes me terribly happy. As for the best wiki I ever used, was the FB internal one, I think it was based on Mediawiki, but I was only an user, not the maintainer. It was integrated with pretty much everything else FB uses internally.

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