The Wiki Weekend Part 1: Motivation and Other Wikis

Page created: 2025-06-09
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The best kind of software scratches an itch, right?

I have been very itchy with a brain full of ideas for simple wikis for a long time. This last weekend, I finally scratched it. Even though the last thing on Earth I needed was another project, I’ve gotta say, it feels good to scratch that itch. No regrets.

In this particular instance, I needed a wiki that was dirt simple to install and use. It needed to work reliably for non-technical users and it needed to keep working with minimal hassle when "regular life" gets in the way. I absolutely can not be baby-sitting this software.

So there was a specific goal here.

But first, I did try not building my own, I swear!

I explored quite a few of the wikis available. The field is surprisingly similar to the same as the last time I looked. I guess greenfield wiki development isn’t real hot right now?

MediaWiki (mediawiki.org)

"MediaWiki helps you collect and organise knowledge and make it available to people. It’s powerful, multilingual, free and open, extensible, customisable, reliable, and free of charge."

MediaWiki is the big one. The one that runs Wikipedia. I was inspired to give it a go when I saw that Foone Turing (foone.org) uses it as a personal project Wiki.

Well, I got MediaWiki installed (Composer, etc.) and partially set up and it was going just fine…​ But the truth is that part of me already knew I wasn’t going to stick with it at the exact moment when I unzipped the tarball and saw that it was 30,789 files at 448Mb!

Look, I appreciate that this things is full-featured, but this isn’t just a wiki, it’s an operating system for text files! (I love you MediaWiki, I just know that I am not going to be able to maintain something this big and complex.)

DokuWiki (dokuwiki.org)

"DokuWiki is simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn’t require a database. It is loved by users for its clean and readable syntax. The ease of maintenance, backup and integration makes it an administrator’s favorite."

The last time I used DokuWiki was over a decade ago. It’s been continually updated and maintained since 2004. Dokuwiki is much smaller than MediaWiki at "just" 1,909 files at 9Mb. Installation of DokuWiki is as I remembered. It takes an evening to get all setup. Like many wikis, it’s pretty quirky software, but it’s extremely flexible and featureful. I recommend it!

However, DokuWiki is still much too complex for my non-technical audience. The interface is daunting if you’re just there to write some text. I mean, it’s all good stuff - functionality that somebody depends on, but stuff I don’t need.

I had DokuWiki running for a couple weeks and spent some time removing items from the interface, enlarging others, and otherwise trying to simplify it for my specific use-case. But at some point, I realized I also wanted to add some tiny features, and doing so meant really getting into DokuWiki’s innards.

At the end of the second week, I was fighting the software more than working with it. I threw in the towel and started looking again. I still needed something smaller.

kiki (tomodashi.com)

"kiki is a homepage building kit written with the Tomodashi design philosophy. It’s built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos."

I love everything about this wiki, the websites it was created to create, and the philosophy around all of it (tomodashi.com). Kiki (the name is lowercase, but I’m going to capitalize it to avoid confusion) is shareware, so I tried it out. I liked it so much that I bought the full version.

Installation was a snap and customization was much easier than DokuWiki. It’s 234 files at 3Mb, but most of those are included plugins and themes. The core of the wiki is tiny. Just a handful of PHP files.

"The source code is ~1500 lines of code (< 50Kb). That’s small enough that a human being can read it all in one sitting, and understand how it works."

If you like the Tomodashi site and/or want to build a simple website or wiki, I think Kiki is a fantastic option.

At last, I had a wiki that was probably simple enough for my non-technical users!

But I was still haunted with ideas for a wiki of my own. I wrote the ideas in my notebook for "later", hoping that would allow my mind to rest.

"Oh no!" to "Oh yeah!"

Still, the thoughts kept coming. How was I going to integrate all of these useful ideas into Kiki? Again, I was fighting the software to be something different than it was meant to be!

Ironically, it was Kiki, not the larger wikis, that inspired me to just go ahead and build my own from scratch. Somehow, paying a small fee for Kiki gave me "permission" to make mine. Does that make sense?

No, me either.

Anyway, let the wiki weekend wiki begin! (If you didn’t know, "wiki" is a Hawaiian word that means "quick." Now you know and can enjoy my amazing wordplay.)

Onward, to The Wiki Weekend Part 2: The Page Editor Idea!