
Self Host a Wiki or Knowledge Base for Your Team - chsasank
http://chsasank.github.io/outline-self-hosted-wiki.html
======
techsupporter
Unless I am remembering wrong (and the copy stored at the Internet Archive
seems to agree with me[0]), you're not allowed to use the Outline source code
for production use and you're definitely not allowed to use it in a way that
lets third parties contribute to it.

A non-free blob of software that requires integration with a _definitely_ non-
free separate service (Slack) that I can't also self-host doesn't sound all
that attractive to someone (like me) who is interested in self-hosting.

The software is pretty but those sparkly binds are a bit too tight.

0 - Had to check here since, as of writing, Github is under the weather:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20200614175138/https://github.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200614175138/https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE)

~~~
tommoor
The BSL is meant to be open source "in spirit", with the sole restriction
being that you can't run a competitive hosted service because that's the only
way the project sustains itself.

Internally hosting a copy for your own company is purposefully within the
bounds of the license.

~~~
quanticle
There's no such thing as "open source in spirit". Either something is open
source, and I can use and redistribute the software per the requirements of
the Open Source Initiative, or I cannot. "Open source in spirit" means, in
practice, "closed source, but we probably won't sue you if we like you". While
that's certainly fine for a _personal_ wiki, I would have strong qualms about
using this for a business.

~~~
jonfw
Open source isn't a term exclusively owned and defined by the OSI.

You can define it however you like, but that term has long been used to
describe projects that don't quite fit in OSI's box.

To be clear- I think OSI has the best definition that I would like to see- but
'somewhat open source' is certainly better than nothing.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I think those of us who like the OSI definition of "Open Source" should
actively push back on use of the term to mean something other than the OSI
definition. I'd rather see licenses like the BSL called "source available" or
some such.

~~~
tommoor
Yea, at this point we're careful to only use the language of open source where
it applies, for example our editor _is_ OSI compatible

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Nemo_bis
Outline is proprietary software.
[https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE](https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/develop/LICENSE)

Also, are you saying it requires you to run Slack alongside?

There are many good and free software wiki engines, I don't see why one would
choose such a headache.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software)

~~~
chsasank
I looked at BookStack, dokuwiki, mediawiki and multiple other open source
wikis. None of them are as intuitive and easy to use as outline.

~~~
waf
Did you look at wiki.js ( [https://wiki.js.org/](https://wiki.js.org/) )?

I've been evaluating wikis too, and that's at the top of my list because it
checks the boxes of having a git backend, markdown, and third-party auth
providers.

Only downside is that it's NodeJS, which I'd rather not deal with given our
existing tech stack, but as an internal app it should be fine.

~~~
sdwolfz
I've installed wikijs for a small team of developers at their request.

The biggest selling point for this piece of software, compared to showing them
5 other alternatives, is that it looks good, it's eye candy. And that is
exactly what I've seen people want from software like these. They want to feel
good when they open it and browse, they want to see a modern look, it makes
the experience of using and maintaining a knowledge base more appealing so
they engage more. Feature wise it's no confluence, nor xwiki, it's just a page
editor with user management, but it's quick to set up, uses extreemely little
memory by default, feels fast and looks good, so they don't mind if they see
some functionality missing.

Among more and more tools that I install for people I see this pattern where
they are judged by their looks above features, and it's not easy for me to
fully understand it... But then again I started learning and programming ruby
for the same reason, it looked and felt good, so I stuck with it.

So I guess the big takeaway here is not a large pepperoni pizza from domino's,
but the fact that software looks matter, a lot, and it's probably going to
matter more and more in the future.

~~~
mekster
What's not so easy to understand that the looks matter?

I've gone through a list of wiki apps a few months ago as DokuWiki was showing
its age, every time the demo page looked like some web from the 90's, I don't
care what features it has but closed it instantly.

I do full stack web but I make sure it's also visually pleasing for anything I
build because there's no reason to give users eye pain.

I'd rather think that anything that doesn't look good means the author had no
time for visual adjustment as the internals still has a lot to be desired.

------
greggman3
2003-2006 my team used Lotus Notes as our team wiki. It was so much nicer than
an actual wiki if only because there was a tree view on the left and it would
highlight in bold anything that had been updated since you last read it.

The tree view also let you see the entire content rather than just a random
bunch of pages you might have to spider through to find things.

Any wikis do that? Track individual reading? and which ones have the best non-
techie UX where I can easily add images, diagrams, video, without having to
jump through hoops?

~~~
eitland
> Any wikis do that? Track individual reading? and which ones have the best
> non-techie UX where I can easily add images, diagrams, video, without having
> to jump through hoops?

OneNote - while not a real wiki in my opinion - was close enough and could do
this and I sometimes recommended it to Microsoft centric clients of mine.

Now they are leaving the version I liked behind but some people might enjoy
the new version.

~~~
carlosf
I wish One Note allowed markdown blocks, I like how easy you can paste things
like pictures and drawings, but it does not work well for stuff like code
blocks.

~~~
eitland
Off the top of my mind tagging is also a weak spot (it insists on users using
one of a number of defined tags, and while tags can be added it takes time and
you also cannot type them out but have to rely on clumsy nested dropdows for
all but the top 10 that can be reached via keyboard shortcuts.)

I'm fairly certain there was more problems but all in all OneNote still used
to be a good solutions for smaller companies that was stuck in Microsoft land
anyway.

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znpy
I started using mediawiki as a personal knowledge base and it's working very
well for me.

Working with categories is still on the todo list for me, as I would like
something similar to a tree-view, but I'm in no hurry.

Also, I plan to play with mediawiki's API to see how far I can go.

~~~
jiggunjer
what kind of backups do you make, just regular database dumps?

~~~
znpy
I take a snapshot of the underlying zfs dataset.

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dsr_
There are dozens of good open-source wikis available. Getting one set up is
generally less than an hour's work.

Getting people to contribute can be a problem, but if the workflow is easy and
there are things to document, it will work out.

Cleaning up after the fact is usually a bigger problem. Even with full-text
search (a requirement, IMO) a large wiki can become a terrible dump. Library
science is a real field, and if you can afford a librarian, you definitely
want one.

~~~
cborenstein
> Getting people to contribute can be a problem This is so spot on. and I
> don't think it even has to be a problem.

The way people actually work is they 1) write a ton of private notes 2) share
a small amount of these notes ad-hoc 3) publish a tiny amount of this to a
wiki

To make knowledge more available, the key is to streamline these steps.

Building an app that's grounded in this workflow. Would love to hear the
community's feedback on it.

[0] [https://bytebase.io](https://bytebase.io)

------
diego_moita
> We experimented with TiddlyWiki. [...] But its non linear organization makes
> it super unintuitive and confusing.

The main reason I like TiddlyWiki is precisely because it is so simple and
easy to use.

~~~
pingpongchef
TiddlyWiki is ideal for a few scenarios I work on.

1\. It's great as a notebook for organizing a creative endeavor like tabletop
roleplaying. 2\. Its tagging querying capabilities are robust. So robust that
I've had success using it to tag media and run complex queries (e.g., select
all items having tag1 and exclude items having tag2 and exclude items with
value "value1" for key "key1") to where I can use it to manage media

------
neilv
For a small startup team, we now simply do this as Markdown files in our
monorepo.

Some such Markdown files correspond 1:1 with code, and (for things like devops
processes with a script component), are named the same, or with the same
codename, often with just the filename extension differing. Other Markdown
files have names like `ops/aws.md` and `20200713-foo-braindump-meeting-
notes.md`.

Normally, these are in the git main branch (unless some documentation
addition/change is really tied to changes in a development branch).

Just putting it in the repo means one fewer place people have to look (or not
see) for important info. GitLab handles all the version-preserving, awareness
of changes, etc.

I usually use GitLab Web IDE for quick changes, and my favorite file editor
for bigger changes.

I do this after previously using wikis for key information, and decided that
the monorepo is simpler, and seems more likely to be kept updated. (I
previously loved wikis, and wrote an Emacs mode for one of the wikis when I
used it at a well-known company, but I'm liking the monorepo approach even
better for the current startup. [https://www.neilvandyke.org/erin-twiki-
emacs/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/erin-twiki-emacs/) )

------
makethetick
If you're already using Google docs internally then
[https://youneedawiki.com/](https://youneedawiki.com/) is a great front end
for a quick and easy wiki

------
mro_name
If you like low-tech [https://dokuwiki.org](https://dokuwiki.org) (PHP, no-
DB).

~~~
aorth
Been using DokuWiki for personal worklog and team notes for ten years. Love
it.

------
ishitatsuyuki
I appreciated the design of Outline, until I looked at their website and found
that... it's a complete rip-off of Notion?

I've been using Notion for a while, and the commands/block mechanism has been
bothering me the most. I don't think it's the way forward for WYSIWYG markup
editors.

------
rglullis
Others have already pointed out that outline is not really open source, so I
will just link to the one alternative that worked for me as a self-hosted,
open source (straight AGPL) alternative to Confluence:
[https://documize.com](https://documize.com)

~~~
mikro2nd
Also worth noting that Outline's license seems to come from the future:

    
    
      Change Date:          2023-07-03

~~~
vvillena
That's the date when the licensed software becomes GPL-compatible. That's the
main feature of the BSL.

------
qerim
[Bookstack]([https://www.bookstackapp.com/](https://www.bookstackapp.com/))
has been working very well for us. Lots of great features and good UI. Also it
integrates with LDAP and is open-source.

------
eugeniub
I looked into self-hosted wikis for our team earlier this year. Outline looked
very promising, but as the author here mentioned, the documentation was indeed
lacking. It seemed to me that they're more intent on pushing their paid plans.

Ultimately we landed on BookStack
([https://www.bookstackapp.com/](https://www.bookstackapp.com/)) and people in
our org love it. Deployment instructions were pretty easy to follow for
someone who doesn't do many server deployments, the UI is great, and the
feature set is sufficient for our needs. Plus, the lead developer is extremely
helpful in answering questions on Discord.

~~~
ssddanbrown
BookStack creator/lead dev here. Great to hear your users like the platform
and that installation was smooth. Hope the platform works well for you going
into the future.

~~~
npsomaratna
Thanks for creating such a great product. After trying (and being
dissatisfied) with many different self-hosted Wikis, we stumbled on BookStack
- and never looked back.

------
etherio
Interesting. I am currently building a personal self-hosted knowledge base
program that uses ElasticSearch to find and organize your data but is also
synced into your filesystem with markdown files. So you create a new file in
your data/ dir and it will automatically create a new search index that you
can view in the software's ui.

It also allows you to have bookmarks where it actually downloads the contents
of the bookmarked webpage to make sure it's preserved on your own system.

------
dlivingston
Quite surprised it hasn't been mentioned here yet, but Wiki.js [0] is
absolutely phenomenal. We use it in our research group as a team knowledge
base, using LDAP authentication and scheduled backups to our GitLab instance.
It's open source software that, in another era, we would have paid $10k for a
license.

[0]: [https://wiki.js.org](https://wiki.js.org)

~~~
ics
Has wiki-style linking been added yet? I gave it a trial run for several users
and was baffled by the lack of linking features (short syntax, autocomplete of
existing paths, highlight non-existent endpoints) which I consider part of the
essential functionality of modern wiki software.

~~~
mekster
You can link to another page by selecting from the list of existing pages.

Why do you want to link to a non existing page? You can create an empty page
first and link to it.

------
unixhero
I for one have had a huge success for my private note taking as well as my own
team's collaboration with BookStack.
[https://www.bookstackapp.com/](https://www.bookstackapp.com/)

------
imglorp
Has anyone used the GitHub wiki as part of a professional work group?
Wondering how that went? If you're already using paid github it seems no
brainer.

~~~
arianvanp
We tried. But github search is such a joke that it's basically impossible to
navigate; hence looking for something else now

~~~
ravenstine
That's also been my experience. To be fair, most of today's search engines
suck really bad. No exact match, no special symbols, no wildcards, etc. The
power user had better tools at their disposal back in 1999.

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adamsvystun
The main problem with Outline is that it does not support collaborative
editing. That's a deal-breaker (for our team at least).

~~~
thenanyu
Hey hey — I'm an Outline contributor (OS, not part of the company). It's on
the roadmap, a big part of the reason for a major recent rewrite of the
underlying engine was to set up support for live collaborative editing.

------
hacker_newz
Why do you need slack for a wiki?

