Advice for starting a Wiki project
I am considering starting a wiki project for an academic niche. I've already started prototyping using Gitit, I've written a bit easy pages to get a feel for the software and am planning to start working on the most important page that summarises the topic itself, which I believe will help guide me to which pages to create first.
Now, here I'm asking for general advice to a newcomer n00bie wiki admin like me: what to expect, what software, etc. Any advice welcome, but I'll list a few questions below:
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What wiki software? I am liking Gitit, it is nice and easy to set up, and comes with its own server which I run with a systemctl user unit in the background. I tried Oddmuse but couldn't get it to work with a simple server; Ikiwiki setup is too clumsy for my liking (it friggin put stuff on my
$HOMEby default!); I want to avoid PHP stuff in general; I want a simple wiki that serves simple HTML pages. -
How to defend against spam? My plan is to keep it invite-only for as long as I can. IDK how to do that with Gitit yet.
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How to serve it securely and for cheap, once I decide to publish? It probably won't ever grow beyond a few dozens of megabytes in file size.
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How do you go about promoting a wiki?
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What peripheral services (issue tracker, mailing list, IRC/Discord/etc channels) go well with a wiki?
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What tools are available to ensure content quality (no plagiarism, enforce conventions, monitor changes, ...)?
I'm preferential to wiki.php. It's all flat files, the "deepness" is very flexible, and is markup based. Also, I'm the author :)
Keeping it invite-only is easy, since you can control who has push access to your git repo. Never thought about periphery, since it was mainly written for a pubnix, which has an IRC channel already.
You can host it for cheap on a vps. Shouldn't cost more than $5/month, for most any wiki solution.