Comment by busterarm

8 hours ago

I've been at more than one company that migrated _from_ MediaWiki to Confluence. It usually boils down to "non-developers have to use this and Markdown+plugins is hard".

Turns out no matter how much better the thing is, the users have to know what they're doing more than the operators do.

Been there before too (though an alternative to MediaWiki). A few important pages were migrated but we just ended up with two wikis with lots of tech info on the old one and lots of marketing info on Confluence.

I'm not surprised. We're trying to migrate from Jira and Confluence (because we can't have our data outside our servers), and while Jira has many alternatives, it's difficult to find worthy competitors to Confluence. They either have an awful UI/UX, or don't have as many features. We're looking at Xwiki, but simply try to have multiple users simultaneously edit a table and you'll see why everyone prefers Confluence...

  • I'm partial to YouTrack but I also haven't used it in 10 years and it was painful to set up.

visualeditor has been a thing for a long time now, no non technical user needs to ever touch markdown

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor

It's the same GUI WYSIWYG interface you get by default if editing a page on public wikipedia.

  • 99.99999% of people will never even attempt to edit a page on wikipedia.

    Also VisualEditor sucks if you've never used VisualEditor before and sucks even more for anything complicated. This is the kind of tonedeafness non-technical users get to their feedback all the time.