To answer your intitial question: Yes please suggest any improvement ideas. Adding, reordering (or dropping) features is no problem.

Your suggestion is a good idea. I'd like to collect other feature item wishes here and add them in a bunch, so keep ideas coming.

Dropping of selected Wikis
Would be nice, if one could drop Wikis from the comparison table as one finds them unsuitable for the desired purpose. First you select 4 different Wikis. 3 of them are free and open-source, one isn't, so you drop that one from the comparison to finally end up with one that meets your requirements.

Complexity of set-up
In other comparisons i found it to be helpful to get an opinion about how difficult it is to set a certain wiki up. Though i don't know what metric to use or who to ask for that information, maybe someone comes up with a decent idea.

Description of attributes
A deeper description of the comparison attributes would be nice. The "mouse-over" boxes are nice and helpful, they should definitely stay. Not very originally i must admit. Could be, that this is one of the next things you wanted to add and already have in mind.

Rights Management
For me personally there should be more detail in the "Security" section. Though wikis are generally meant to be open and self-controlling, a detailled user/-group management (page and function restrictions, group pages,...) could be desired in a corporate context.

Despite my remarks (more to come, if desires): Great work, it had to be done by someone For it shall be vital and develop quickly.

A couple more new features for the matrix:
  - Page refactoring:
      - Does it support redirect pages? (dartar mentioned this; I'm just voting for it too)
      - How does the wiki handle renaming of pages?  (E.g. does it leave dead links behind?  Does it automatically create a redirect page?  Does it go through all the pages and update the links for you automatically?  Does it even allow page renames in the first place?)
      - How does it handle page deletions?

  - Namespaces (again, already mentioned):
      - Supported at all?
      - Hierarchical namespaces, or only one level?
      - Can you rename a whole namespace, i.e. new name, but within the same parent namespace?  If so, how well supported?
      - Can you move a namespace, i.e. to within a different parent?
      - In syntax section, add entries for namespace-related syntax elements:
          - Link to another page in the same namespace
          - Link to page in a sub-namespace (i.e. one level down)
          - Link to page in super-namespace (i.e. one level up, ".." in UNIX terms)
          - Link to page in top-level namespace (absolute pathname, in UNIX terms)

  - What kinds of authentication are supported?  (/etc/passwd, Active Directory, local database, none at all, ...)

As well, some indication of performance would be very useful.  Is it snappy, or a real pig?  I don't know if that's feasible, given how your updates are done, but if so, it'd rock!

Thanks for a great site!

erics wrote:

As well, some indication of performance would be very useful.  Is it snappy, or a real pig?  I don't know if that's feasible, given how your updates are done, but if so, it'd rock!

erics, I'd love to see performance indicators among the comparison benchmarks, but only if they are measurable. A way to provide this would be to install a default version of each wiki engine on this server, then create a sample page (to be translated in the wiki's own dialect) and have a script measure the exact time between the request and the complete rendering of the page. This would provide a precise and quantitative measure of rendering performance for specific kinds of content.

Without something "measurable", I think it's difficult to give users a convincing idea about the differences in performance between flat-text vs. relational DB engines or between lightweight vs. full-featured engines.

lhl wrote:

One way of giving sense of performance in a measurable way (and the way that probably matters) is perhaps a listing of the largest known installation (pages and users).

This is what I personally call scalability, which is a relevant (and measurable) parameter, but scalability != performance.

lhl wrote:

I think right now there really isn't any 'scaling' information.  IE, how authN/authZ can be customized, delegation of administration, support for multiple spaces, etc.

Agreed: wikifarm support, group management and user-/page-administration modules could be nice features to list in the matrix.

Another feature:

List editor's contributions.

Surprising, many wikis don't have a way to list/track your and other's contributions to the wiki.

What about listing a slideshow feature for comparison?

dartar wrote:

Development
Add a developer feature group, where wiki devs can add links to :
- SVN/CVS repository
- issue tracker
- mailing list
- IRC channel

Hi dartar is there a wiki who can manage a repository (SVN/CVS-like) ?

See also :

- http://www.wikimatrix.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=46
- http://forum.dokuwiki.org/thread/191

Last edited by sidarus (2006-08-23 22:51:00)

andi wrote:

Okay removing and adding engines to a comparison was just added. Just scroll down to the bottom of the table. I'll have a look at the suggested new features tomorrow.

Thank you for adding these add/remove features. They are very helpful.

I hope that you don't mind a suggestion with regard to them.  With "add" (an engine), please make the feature more visible at the top of the page. That would be either by copying it to the top of the page or by adding an anchor link to it from the top of the page. 

With "remove", please make it easier to see which Wiki engine is to be removed. This could be achieved by adding the name of the engine at the bottom of the column adjacent to the "remove" button.  Or have the name of the wiki engine in the alt text for its particular remove button.  Or, perhaps change the remove button to a typical "delete" icon (swishy red 'X') added adjacent to each repitition of the engine name down the comparison column -- including replacing the current "remove" button at the bottom.  That would also have the benefit of putting the name at the bottom of the column where it would be handy to see. (The engine names are currently out of site above the "markup" row.)

I hope this is at least a little helpful as both WikiMatrix and ForumMatrix are to the whole web community.  Continued good luck with with both of them and thank you for building and maintaining these terrific sites.

Nice site, it will help us pick a wiki.  Please consider -

1) More selections on search features - Is it indexed or scanned?  Are the indexes updated on save, or in batch?  Are the searches in sections, or only whole site?

2) More selections on attachments (AKA media) - Are these searchable?  Is there are revision history?  Are thumbnails generated and used?  Can these be attached in sets?

3) The comparison wizard starts with nothing to do except check too many wikis for comparison, then click search.  Please put 5 to 10 key questions onto the front page and drop the initial checklist.  (I suggest free/paid, WYSIWIG?, diff any/only first, ACL/open, text/DB/other, attachments searchable?, search indexed? and system requirements as key features.) Once this is entered, then create the wiki checklist with the prequalified candidates and display them in a matrix with summaries of lesser features (like the initial symbols for free/paid.)

"Root access" says "No" for "better" wikis, i.e. normally wiki should not require root access. I would like to suggest to reformulate this comparison feature so it would say "Yes" (e.g. make it "Non-root installation" or "Root access is not required"). Then it would be easier to compare wikis by observing which one has more "Yes".

Probably there are other comparison features which could be reverted in such way...

Could I request "reStructuredText Support" as a feature comparison?
I don't see it in the current list, although MarkDown, Textile etc are there.