This is not strictly self-hosted per se, but I am looking for your guidance.
I am standing up a wiki. I want it to use available FOSS wiki frameworks, all our self-hosted loving things.
However: the probably of this becoming a moderately trafficked page are high. So I also need to consider scale (cloudflare, captcha, auth, do I use Vercel? etc.), light-weightness (this is a Wiki but not too massive), and all that jazz. This is also someone who won’t like alt-wikis and is a very layman, mainstream audience. So “wikipedia but SEO friendly/article style” is also a plus. It will be less deeply linked than Wikipedia across pages, but is still a repository for info that will be revisited for its different components for a long time.
People with experience spinning up or hosting trafficked wiki pages: what do I do?
Thanks gang.
I have been having excellent luck with MkDocs Material. It’s very lightweight and has a ton of extensibility. Their documentation itself is written using their own software and gives you a great idea of what it has to offer: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/
I use it both at work and for a game squadron wiki. It’s entirely written in Markdown so syntax is pretty quick to learn as well. Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s become my new go to for documentation.
If scale is a concern, then you want to be reducing drag as much as possible. Database lookups and edits can get expensive, so maybe just avoid them outright: DokuWiki only requires a web server with PHP. It keeps content as plain files, making it easy to serve up and to back up.
But it’s often said that perfection is when nothing can be taken away, so what if we remove PHP as well? In this case, we need the content to already be rendered HTML. And we can do that, since there’s a body of site generation packages that build from Markdown files. I found this one while randomly searching: https://codeberg.org/milofultz/swiki
At this point, it’s just a plain web server that dishes out static HTML files. Such simplicity will withstand most AI scrapers, because the cost per request is now absurdly low. And caching a static site is not particularly difficult. Indeed, if the sum total of the wiki content is small enough, it might even fit into something like Codeberg Pages, which means we’ve eliminated even the web server (though this would depart from c/selfhosted).
What seems to be missing from that swiki package – but is entirely feasible – would be to have all content in Markdown files and live in a Git repo, and the Git history itself is used as the Wiki history. This means your pages would retain the classic wiki change log, so that it can all be generated from a Git repo that’s small enough to keep on a floppy disk.
Shorter version: instead of wiki software, use a static site generated from a git repo. It’s a valid approach. I think emacswiki may have once worked that way. Note that Gitit uses git for version management, so among other things you can copy your whole wiki with git clone. But it also has a built in web editor instead of just relying on git push.
Just use mediawiki
Mediawiki powers Wikipedia
Does it need to be self-hosted? Having someone else manage the infrastructure is a huge load off your plate.
No, not self-hosted. That’s why I put the caveat in here. I am a self-hoster, but this is beyond that scope, but I still want that vibe / workflow where possible.
Is it public facing in the sense that randos will edit it? If not, the simplest thing is probably fossil-scm.org which is very light weight, but it’s actually a version control system with a built in wiki, so its editing interface is a bit weird compared with Wikipedia. It is pretty fast though I’ve only played with it, not run anything public facing from it.
Setting up Mediawiki is more complicated but it does have a familiar interface. I don’t know how much tuning and configuration you have to do to allow it to handle a lot of traffic, but obviously with enough caching and stuff, it scales all the way up to Wikipedia level.
I’ve also used Gitit and I think MoinMoin but not with any significant amount of traffic. Gitit looks like Mediawiki while MoinMoin is retro, like 1990s style.
By the way https://fossil-scm.org/home/timeline is the most beautiful webpage I’ve ever seen.
Randos will not edit. There may be users who edit in the future, but it’s not a “register and edit” sort of thing. It’s more of a living breathing guide, that has the flow of Wikipedia (as well as the SEO benefits–it’s the type of information people will search and want to find, and land on it in this format to learn and reference).
Really it’s better to think of it as SEO-optimized wiki formatting. There may be editors in the future, but not in the near future, as a lot of the content will be covered. If there’s editing, it’ll be submission-based and approved or denied.
You might try Fossil then. It uses something like 2MB of server ram instead of gigabytes. It makes me wonder where we all went wrong.
