Comparison between TWiki and MediaWiki

Which wiki should a company choose?

This article doesn’t want to be a TWiki advertisement. In fact it shall help enterprises who are evaluating which wiki software to use by giving reliable arguments and feasible answers. Here we compare TWiki to MediaWiki. We want to distinguish both systems and describe their aims.

MediaWiki get's most "leads" from its reference Wikipedia

MediaWiki is Wikipedia’s operating software and that’s the killer argument for the system. Many Managers see the success of the web encyclopedia and reason:

• if Wikipedia succeeds we will succeed, too, if we just use the same software.

But that’s not true. Successful Corporate Wikis depend on different criteria and have other success factors. One plausible counter-argument is:

• "If the success of Wikipedia would drive its wiki-software to be the best Wiki-Software for all needs, it would be the only available Wiki-Software. It would lead to a lot abandoned wiki-projects, that are obsolete."

MediaWiki has been written for Wikipedia exclusively and is optimized on it’s needs. The requirements of a web lexicon and those of a company are entirely different. A company isn’t in need of lexicon, it’s in need of an intranet extension based on a wiki. A wiki should be specific to the individual demands of the enterprise.

Another argument for MediaWiki is it’s high security against vandalism. Indeed it’s possible to undo changes rapidly, and MediaWiki is very good at comparing different versions of documents. But that’s a feeble argument. Such options may be useful for a web lexicon. For an enterprise they are obsolete. With every change and move the system saves the IP of the computer the change was made from. Furthermore most employees are logged in to the intranet additionally. So the wiki always “knows” who changed which document, every IP can be personalised by the IT department without any difficulty, and each modification can be retraced. Therefore vandalism in a company’s wiki doesn’t occur. The needs of Wikipedia are different from the company’s needs. Hence MediaWiki isn’t a suitable solution, just because of good vandalism-protection.

The strengths of TWiki are the quality and quantity of the applications offered for the system. There are more than 200 plug-ins which are completely concerted to a company’s needs. MediaWiki offers several extensions, too. But many of those aren’t fully developed or aren’t functional at all. Most of the TWiki plug-ins are developed by professionals or companys who really care about the quality and adaptability of their applications with a view to give the community something back. According to this the extensions are on a high level of maturity. Moreover TWiki permits to write applications which perform a lot of tasks and is far ahead of MediaWiki in that case. Mighty extensions such as the ChartPlugin are a good example on how to raise the intranet’s reporting efficiency and effectiveness significantly.

List of arguments for MediaWiki

• Wikipedia is built with MediaWiki. MediaWiki will surely be developed further in the future.
• The Wiki Markup used in Wikipedia is most likely to become "the" standard syntax for Wiki Markup
• MediaWiki is especially good on vandalism-issues.
• Very active and broad community
• Very good performance for reads (through caching) without customizations
• Good I18N using full Unicode
• RecentChanges is very detailed
  • Creates impression of activity, which can be good for uptake, but is often minor re-edits.

List of arguments for TWiki

• One of the most widely used wikis in enterprises
• Over 200 PlugIns based on corporate needs.
• Active community with a lot of experience of corporate wiki issues
• StructuredWiki features
• WYSIWYG editing built-in
• Can provide good performance using ModPerl, TWikiCache, etc - but needs some customization/setup
• Reasonable I18N but no real UnicodeSupport
• Good access control and authentication/authorization features built-in
• Strong attachment support for document uploads
  • TWiki has versioned attachments with names that need only be unique within a single TWiki page
    • MediaWiki attachments (uploads/images) use a global namespace so users must use a file naming convention to keep filenames unique and avoid a mess of files where it's unclear which ones are out of date - the MediaWiki upload feature is really designed for JPG/GIF images, not documents
  • TWiki allows any file type to be uploaded, unless specifically excluded by administrator - MediaWiki requires administrator (with ability to edit files directly on server) to add file types.
• Easy to customize TWiki navigation bars - just edit a text page
  • Harder to do this on MediaWiki, I still haven't figured out how to do this
• Revision control uses explicit version numbers
  • Easy to see from a printed copy of TWiki page which version it was based on - MediaWiki just uses dates
• RecentChanges is less detailed
  • Changes by same person to a page within 1 hour count as one version - TWiki site will seem less active but also de-clutters RecentChanges
• Editable InterWiki settings built-in
  • MediaWiki requires a specific extension to be installed so users can edit the Interwiki settings - only administrator can delete the large default list of Interwiki settings

-- Contributors: MartinSeibert - 21 Mar 2008

Discussion

I'm using MediaWiki quite a lot at work at the moment, as it's the wiki already installed by our IT department. Have added to some of the arguments above.

The biggest issue with Wikis is really getting people to use them - having our boss start using the Wiki was a key step forward.

-- RichardDonkin - 21 Mar 2008

There is a very cool site for comparing Wiki softwares characteristics. It shows a big list of Wiki softwares, you can choose 2 or more and it shows a table with a list of characteristics of each:

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

-- GuilhermeGarnier - 24 Mar 2008

Good point - it is discussed at WikiMatrix. Some of the above are probably not captured by WikiMatrix but it's a good starting point.

One new difference added.

-- RichardDonkin - 27 Mar 2008

The argument I hear most often when people switch from MediaWiki to TWiki is that mediawiki is missing some of the enterprise features TWiki has got, i.e. (sub)webs and access controll. The only reason to stay with MediaWiki - imho - is its scalability. If you have to manage a very large knowledge base think hard why not to use MediaWiki in favour of TWiki.

On a more technical level: MediaWiki's table markup is much more flexible while still quite clean. We have a MediaWikiTablePlugin to bring that to TWiki land. MediaWiki has got parametrized transclusions as TWiki has, but handles parameters differently. TWiki expands markup in parameter position before doing the transclusion - MediaWiki passes the markup down to the transcluded topic and evaluates it in the called context. So MediaWikiApplications can't easily be ported to TWikiApplications, by far not automatically.

-- MichaelDaum - 27 Mar 2008

Thanks for the additional comments. That gives possibilities to enhance this article significantly with Screenshots and examples.

-- MartinSeibert - 28 Mar 2008

Some more bullets added above. The attachment support is a huge difference btw, TWiki is much stronger here.

-- RichardDonkin - 28 Mar 2008

Some Links that should be brought into this document: http://tinyurl.com/2hhqbm, MediaWikiToTWikiAddOn, http://tinyurl.com/2k5ac8, http://tinyurl.com/8upsh, http://tinyurl.com/2ylvlj, ...

-- MartinSeibert - 28 Mar 2008