A Personal Wiki

I recently installed a personal wiki on one of my home computers.  The MediaWiki install was part of the package for Ubuntu Linux.  Other wiki flavors with install packages listed in the Synaptic Package Manager also included MoinMoin and 13 or so others.  Among all the choices, I opted for MediaWiki simply because this was the wiki software which powers Wikipedia.  Except for the contents of Wikipedia, it’s proven to be a stable install.

This is not the first time I’ve installed a wiki.  I have had prior experience installing and using a wiki with a Java development team I had managed several years back, and I replicated that with other succeeding projects I worked on.  At home, I also installed a wiki on my Windows XP.  But that was an offshoot of my installing a PHP server at home.  I was thinking that since I already had XAMPP, I just as well should install the wiki components.

On the Linux machine, I had to install Apache, PHP5 and MySQL.  These were easily done with the Synaptic Package Manager.  After installing the backend software, I installed MediaWiki.  The setup of the wiki right after was much easier than other wikis I’ve tried before.

Among other things, a personal wiki allows me to maintain a web site on the local machine.  I can insert internet links and keep documents on the database, and have the flexibility to access the data and files on the other machine.  Setting the wiki as a home page for the browser, it becomes a launcher to the websites I frequent.  And I don’t have to migrate the bookmarks from Firefox to Safari and Opera.

Although a wiki was designed to be groupware, it offers lots of advantages to a single user.  The ability to manage web-pages is a big plus, editing a web-page name, moving it around and so on, automatically updates all the links associated with that page.

Admittedly it is not as elegant a solution as a Word documentation purposes.  But the adding hyperlinks makes up for this.  It’s a lot easier to jump from one page to another link when working with webpages, rather than a document format.  This is specially true for a set of documents, you just add pages, and no need to edit the main document.  Wiki setups also have historical and audit trails, where you can check who edited what and go back to a point-in-time version.  All versions are tracked, and you can reverse changes when you revert to an older version of the page.

With MediaWiki, I had to do a step-back as the standards for formatting are slightly different from the other Wikis I have used before.  But it does the job.  I needed a document tracker which is also a document, and I needed it accessible on any of my computers via the LAN without using any folder shares.  And it has to be a no-brainer, no learning curve, kind of thing.  Running on a browser is a bonus.

So far, I’m happy with it.