HACKER Q&A
📣 recvonline

Best self-hosted wiki for local communities?


Hey HN! I moved to a small, rural region of around 50k people across multiple towns. There is a lot going on, but the information is not centrally collected, usually through Facebook and word to mouth.

I want to build out a knowledge base and collect information for everyone to share and contribute.

What is a good browser, self-hosted version of a wiki? I would like to change the design and maybe built out own functionality, and also start somewhere so I don't have to build everything from scratch.

  👤 WinH Accepted Answer ✓
Our team uses Cloudron to host all our internal apps and data, and they offer a number of wiki / forum type of services. We settled on MediaWiki (e.g. Wikipedia Open Source) since it was familiar to everyone. https://www.cloudron.io/store/index.html https://www.cloudron.io/store/org.mediawiki.www.cloudronapp....
👤 overu589
I really like tiddlywiki, especially since you can take offline self contained snapshots, and it is sooo customizable you can become “converted” to its way of doing things.

There has long since been server versions, and recently they released a new and improved service version which takes aim at your needs.

https://mws.tiddlywiki.com/

👤 seletz
If you're a developer, you might start by using a static site generator and GitHub Pages. Stick to Markdown and start collecting and writing stuff. Sooner or later you'll get comments and regular readers. Then you might start to add editing or simply give other people access to GitHub. The editing experience of Markdown files in GitHub is not too bad and you get started in no time.

From my experience it's more often not the tools but the content.

For comments you could use https://giscus.app which integrates very nicely with GitHub.

Doing so you have *no* setup costs.

I'm aware that this is not exactly *self hosted* -- but it has the advantage that you have no upfront cost. And most of the static site generators are just that, you could host the output on any 5$ web server.