User-friendly wiki for end-users/customers

Question

Currently our team is using MoinMoin as a wiki for IT and it's so nice.

We want to promote to use wiki for end-users because some of them are interested. On the wiki we'll share and edit requirements of aplications, for instance.

I think MoinMoin is not the more user-friendy (but I love to use it) that's why we are looking for the best user-friendly wiki for end-users/customers

Answer 1

For yourself MoinMoin is obviously user friendly. =) Seriously, consider all users and try to figure what kinds of usage patterns you have. MoinMoin is a reasonable choice since it's such a simple program. You can often help your non-programmer users by adding a feature or two to MoinMoin. Developers are up to speed with it and you have all the content there already.

That said. Mediawiki is used for lots of general wikis out there today. Including Wikipedia. An aspect of user friendliness is recognition. Mediawiki might feel more friendly because users are more familiar with how it works. And Mediawiki is widely adapted. Lots of extra features you might want to add to help your users are already written as extensions. And Mediawiki's extensions API is really good so you can easily automate your own verticals when the need arises. Mediawiki is reasonably feature rich without being totalluy overloaded. It has categories and templates which both come in handy for keeping things DRY and using the wiki in various processes. It shares lots of its syntax with MoinMoin since both have the same ancestor (syntax-wise).

I'd probably go with Mediawiki.

Answer 2

Visit Wikimatrix.org to determine what features you need and what tool is best for you. I often mention Foswiki.org as a very nice and userfriendly tool, but it really depends on the features that you need.

Answer 3

I have yet to see any Wiki that is more end-user friendly than Confluence.

Just the most important reasons:

• While other Wikis say they have WYSIWYG editors, what they actually do is enclose selected text with markup when clicking an icon. That is not WYSIWYG, that's code injection! In Confluence 5 all editing is done from a visual editor (you actually DO see what you get right away straight within the editor). With the ability to add macros (markup) by powerusers.
• In almost all other wikis the users are entirely responsible for creating and maintaining the link hierarchy. This means broken links and orphaned pages will be the norm. In Confluence all pages are automatically added to a page hierarchy and sorted by name. You can enable the tree browser via the Documentation theme to make browsing the wiki even without manually added links convenient. Lastly you have the ability to reorder pages in any order via drag & drop.

However, Confluence is rather costly for > 10 users. But well worth it if you can afford it, or you don't need more than 10 editors. Pure "readers" do not count towards users if anonymous viewing is enabled.