

Ask HN: Open-source knowledge base or wiki software? - victorhooi

I&#x27;m looking for some software (preferably open-source) that I can use for a personal wiki&#x2F;knowledgebase.<p>On the desktop application front, Microsoft OneNote and Evernote seem to be the best options - however, OneNote&#x27;s online support isn&#x27;t great, and Evernote is unreliable and flakey, and I&#x27;ve had it lose data under me.<p>On the hosted webapps,Confluence is the most complete&#x2F;polished software, however, it&#x27;s quite heavy on the browser, needs a chunky server with lots of RAM to run, and you need to pay a yearly subscription (which I currently do).<p>I&#x27;ve tried MediaWiki, but found the editing UI unintuitive and unpolished for the use case of a personal wiki.<p>A lot of the existing open-source projects seem to be either abandoned, or not very active - and the editing experience is often poor.<p>Are there any good open-source pieces of software suitable for a personal wiki&#x2F;knowledgebase that you guys could recommend?
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walterbell
Open-source:

Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki,
[http://wardcunningham.github.io/](http://wardcunningham.github.io/)

Elog retro UI, mature and flexible,
[http://midas.psi.ch/elog/](http://midas.psi.ch/elog/)

Treesheets, [http://strlen.com/treesheets/](http://strlen.com/treesheets/)

Linux Tomboy,
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Tomboy](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Tomboy)

Non-OSS indie apps:

Windows semantic wiki, Firebase db & Python plugins,
[http://www.connectedtext.com/](http://www.connectedtext.com/)

iOS, Mac, Windows markdown wiki,
[http://www.notebooksapp.com/](http://www.notebooksapp.com/)

Notelynx on Android, interesting UI but no interop:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean.notelynx)

Tools discussion:

[http://www.outlinersoftware.com/search/index/wiki](http://www.outlinersoftware.com/search/index/wiki)

[http://drandus.wordpress.com/](http://drandus.wordpress.com/)

[http://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/](http://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/)

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subsection1h
My personal wiki is powered by Org mode[1] and includes more than 2,000
documents. No other note-taking solution that I've evaluated comes close to
meeting my requirements as well as Org mode does.

Before I switched to Org mode, I evaluated many of the note-taking solutions
discussed at the OutlineSoftware.com forum[2]. If none of the recommendations
here at HN meet your requirements, you should consider browsing that forum.

[1] [http://orgmode.org/manual/](http://orgmode.org/manual/)

[2]
[http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/tlist](http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/tlist)

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corobo
My personal favorite is DokuWiki -
[https://www.dokuwiki.org/](https://www.dokuwiki.org/)

Flat files so very easy to make backups, it's got your standard wiki
functionality (revision history and all that good stuff) and has a fair few
community-made extenions too

Edit: To address another comment here - it also has search functionality

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1331
I use gitit [1], which is open-source [2]. As a programmer, I really like
being able to browse (less), search (grep), and edit (vi) via the command
line. For my personal wiki, I do not even run the web server, saving RAM,
though I can easily start the server if/when desired. Since it is backed by
git, it is also easy to clone the wiki for offline usage and sync when going
back online.

[1] [http://gitit.net/](http://gitit.net/)

[2] [https://github.com/jgm/gitit](https://github.com/jgm/gitit)

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pbj
Have you looked at TiddlyWiki? You could throw it on dropbox or a usb drive.
[http://tiddlywiki.com/](http://tiddlywiki.com/)

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collyw
I have not used a great deal of Wiki software. Is there some sort of standard
file format they can output? So if you want to migrate from one wiki platform
to another, is it generally possible?

~~~
corobo
Not a specific format as such but most use at least similar versions of
markdown - grab the markdown source of the page and paste it into another
engine, it should turn out similar for the most part. If the destination wiki
has a wysiwyg editor you might get away with just copying the text as is and
pasting it in. All depends on the software though, so no there isn't a
specific wiki format that I know of

The issue you'll probably come across is things like categories or custom
boxes (MediaWiki) moving to another site.

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krrishd
[http://raneto.com](http://raneto.com) is a well designed option that I think
would suit your needs.

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showsover
I'm in the same boat as OP, but with an extra requirement.

It should support tagging and searching in text to be of any use.

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eshwarramesh
[https://github.com/gollum/gollum](https://github.com/gollum/gollum)

