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Comment by caseyohara | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a recommendation for Wiki software you like to use? My team is in need of an internal knowledge base, and I like the structure of wikis. Most of the SaaS products I've tried or looked at are a bit too shiny/fancy and don't seem to match my mental model of how a wiki-style knowledge base should work.

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Oxide Computer published their Request for Discussion (RFD) site software [1] that they use for internal published documentation and discussion. Many are published to the public, but some are private. [2] They talk about how they use it and where it came from in their most recent podcast: RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide [3].

I suspect this would be a good 'substitute' for documents that are often hosted on internal wikis.

[1]: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site

[2] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001

[3]: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2065190

My recommendation is, if you want a wiki for developers, use something that is based on a markup language, sources pages from a git repo, and does not do too much magic behind the scenes. This will result in a more maintained and liked wiki than any bloated SaaS wiki.

I like using Starlight for this purpose:

https://starlight.astro.build/

I don't think it really matters which you use. I've unfortunately been stuck in Atlassian for ages.

But if you were shopping for one, from the standpoint of keeping the docs working being able see missing pages and see incoming links to a page are both pretty helpful. I kinda miss the latter.

If you can self host, wiki.js is easy to set up in a docker container. Mediawiki (What Wikipedia runs on) is pretty easy too.

If you have a small team, Obsidian and a syncing solution like git or obsidian sync might work.

I was able to work with my company’s it team to set up a wiki which is only accessible from within the network, including by vpn, and is hosted on a vps.

Confluence, but we're already in deep w Atlassian

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