Difference between MediaWiki and VaultWiki

[Dustin Mattison]

Hello

I have purchased Vaultwiki for Xenforo and tried several times to start using it in my classes, but I kept giving up due to all the time it took to figure out how to use it and dealing with bugs.

Can someone tell me if Mediawiki is any different from Vaultwiki?

Is Vaultwiki a better choice? I found a bridge for Xenforo - Mediawiki, and I am considering using Mediawiki instead of Vaultwiki if it will be easier to use. I don't have a lot of time to mess around figuring out how to get a wiki to work. Perhaps Mediawiki will be easier.

Dustin

 

[Alpha1]

Vaultwiki is definitely a better choice. I have been using VW3 on vbulletin for 6 years (big board) and works like a charm. VW4.0 is still in development, but fairly feature locked. If I understand correctly the only features being added are regressions and aside from that every release is a substantial bug fix release.
Hopefully in 1 or 2 more releases it will be relatively bug free and reach Release Candidate status.

Mediawiki works bug free, but has little integration with xf. The mediawiki interface is complex and most of your members will disregard it. Which defeats the point of having a wiki within your community.

My advise is to keep testing Vaultwiki and keep reporting bugs. @pegasus will always quickly fix any reported bugs, and implement it in the next release/build.
There should be a new release soon, as the releases seem to be around 1 a month, with intermediate builds.

 

[Dustin Mattison]

I am going to try to use Vaultwiki to organize the wiki by projects. I found Wikispaces for Teachers. http://www.wikispaces.com/

This is what I want to do in Xenforo, but I am not sure if I can do it this way.

I want to set up projects and assign people to teams.

I also want to assess the contributions of team members to a project.

 

[Alpha1]

You can create a project based wiki setup and assess contributions, before or after they are published.

Unfortunately it is not possible to have wiki teams within Vaultwiki. I use social groups for this. Maybe @pegasus can give some insight about what he thinks is the optimal way to manage wiki writer groups.

 

[Alpha1]

I see the same discussion is continueing here and @pegasus is explainign a lot of things.

 

[pegasus]

Since Social Groups do not exist in XenForo, the question is how many teams you will actually have. If it's a small number (less than 10), then I would suggest creating a dedicated wiki area for each team. All of that team's content would have to be posted in their area.

If you wanted to really prevent teams from potentially sabotaging each other, you could also make each team as a XenForo usergroup. You would then set your permissions on each area so that only 1 team is allowed to create/edit content.

If each team is working off of an existing collection, put the collection in a separate area that is public to all the teams. You can turn off editing in the original collection and just allow the permissions you need, like allowing teams to translate the collection.

As @Alfa1 has noted, I go into a little more detail on the support site, like tracking team changes and gamification of changes.

 

[Dinosaur]

@Dustin Mattison
Because mediawiki has the aim of being very open (easy to access and add information), it's not really made to have private or locked down areas. However, there's a way to do it if you use a MW extension called Lockdown. Lockdown allows you to lock down namespaces, thus restricting access to no-access, read-only, edit, etc. What you'd have to end up doing is creating different namespaces for each project and assigning permissions to each usergroup as necessary.

The problem with this is if you plan on having a lot of user groups (or plan to add more groups/projects later). It can be very annoying and the permissions all have to be done manually by editing the LocalSettings.php file each time. It's not fun. Plus, custom namespaces can only be made when you first setup the wiki. If you add namespaces after, then the lockdown restrictions won't work for it (I've already tried this, haha.)

In my case, I used mediawiki instead of vaultwiki because I knew there wouldn't be a lot of permission settings I'd have to update a lot in the future. I also planned and created my custom namespaces at the very beginning and knew that there wouldn't be anymore additions after that.

So mediawiki may not be good for you to use if you want to do the team & project thing.

 

[Digital Doctor]

@Dustin Mattison
The strength of Wikis is their structure. They are not structure-less like forum threads.
The weakness is they are harder to use than a forum thread. (anyone can post, eh ?)

The average mediawiki is just curated by a few key admins ... because of the learning curve. Mediawiki itself says that Mediawiki is cumbersome and hard to create/edit.

Forums - easy to use, but are structureless messes.
Mediawiki - hard to use, good structure.

Vaultwiki is a good balance between the two, skewing more towards Mediawiki than to a forum thread.

Unless you know for sure that your users will be willing to edit Mediawiki (you must have alot of nerds if you do) ... then I'd go for Vaultwiki.

Content is King. But if only a few people are using the wiki ... your content won't be as good. Full stop.