History: Tiki vs MediaWiki

Ohloh

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis. Since MediaWiki is so well-known, a frequent question is: What is the difference between MediaWiki and Tiki?

Nobody ever got fired for picking MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the most deployed wiki engine. As such, it enjoys a massive virtuous circle. However, since MediaWiki is primarily developed to run Wikipedia (and your project is not Wikipedia!), it may very well be that MediaWiki is not your best choice. Many people pick MediaWiki just because so many others do. Similar to "Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM", often, people will not go through a proper analysis and consider other wiki engines such as DokuWiki, TWiki, XWiki, MoinMoin, etc. Since it's so well-known, you will likely need arguments to explain this. This page is here to help 😊

If you are already using MediaWiki and you are thinking of moving to Tiki, you can use the MediaWiki importer

Similar

• Both are free and open source web applications with a powerful wiki.
• Both can run on standard, inexpensive hosting.
• Both support Wiki markup. Please see (if) Why Wiki Syntax Is Important to your project.
• Both are written in PHP and can be used with MySQL
• Top-2 wiki engines with the most consultants

Different

• While people often compare them, Tiki is also comparable to Drupal and Joomla! as it's a full-featured CMS which happens to be Wiki-centric.
• MediaWiki is focused on being a great Wiki for projects such as Wikipedia, whereas Tiki is more of an out-of-the box Content Management System / general purpose wiki with all the features built-in. Because of these design choices, Tiki has more features out-of-the-box. MediaWiki doesn't offer forums, bug tracker, blogs, etc
  • The MediaWiki community of course Dogfoods MediaWiki to organize but also needs several other tools such as Bugzilla, vBulletin, etc.
• Tiki is more centralized. Tiki is the all-in-one model while MediaWiki (like Joomla!) is the small-core-and-add-what-you-need model. Each model has its pros & cons.
  • In MediaWiki, there can be more than one "extension" for the same feature so they have different names. Whereas in Tiki, there is only one and thus, the name is descriptive.
  • Tiki has all the features built-in (and you just activate/deactivate features), thus, every Tiki instance of a given version has the same code base. This makes it easier for a hosting company and for upgrades. In contrast, if you maintain dozens of MediaWiki sites, they will have different modules installed depending the use case.
  • When Tiki is upgraded, all the features are supported and the upgrade is smooth. In MediaWiki, some of your plugins/extensions may have become abandoned or be incompatible with the new version.
• MediaWiki is highly optimized for performance and distributing content on hundreds of servers (which is needed for Wikipedia)
  • From the MediaWiki roadmap and the Tiki roadmap, you see the main focus is to power a top-10 site in the World vs adding more features.
• While Tiki is a very large and popular project ( over 200 contributors to main code base and a huge number of installs), MediaWiki is several times larger in terms of install base.
• MediaWiki usually handles multiple languages by having separate installs while Tiki uses the cross lingual wiki engine for synchronized translations. Please read: The Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine: Enabling Collaboration Across Language Barriers
• MediaWiki is GPL, Tiki is LGPL. The main difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the latter can be linked to (in the case of a library, 'used by') a non-(L)GPLed program, which may be free software or proprietary software.
• Thanks to the Smarty template engine, Tiki can look like MediaWiki, but what about the other way around? 😀
• Tiki has a very elaborate permission system while MediaWiki is very clear that "If you need per-page or partial page access restrictions, you are advised to install an appropriate content management package. MediaWiki was not written to provide per-page access restrictions, and almost all hacks or patches promising to add them will likely have flaws somewhere, which could lead to exposure of confidential data." and also "MediaWiki is not designed to be a CMS, or to protect sensitive data. To the contrary, it was designed to be as open as possible. Thus it does not inherently support full featured, air-tight protection of private content."
  • When Tiki is upgraded, all the features are supported and the upgrade is smooth. In WordPress, some of your plugins/extensions may have become abandoned or be incompatible with the new version.

    
    

Wiki Matrix

Compare them at http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/Tiki-Wiki-CMS-Groupware+MediaWiki

Active contributors

Number of contributors who made changes to the project source code each month.

The green line includes contributions to the MediaWiki core and to the extensions.

About MediaWiki as the de facto standard wiki engine

Source:
http://www.communitywiki.org/TooManyWikiEngines

Related

• Five Key Differences between Wikipedia & Enterprise Wikis
• some background information about MediaWiki and TWiki (not to be confused with Tiki😊 )
• Evan Prodromou, MediaWiki developer talks about MediaWiki
• http://dev.tiki.org/2007-07-18+IRC+MediaWiki+discussion
• MediaWiki to TikiWiki converter
• http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/MediaWiki+versus+Tiki
• Where MediaWiki is C, Tiki is C++.
• http://www.gilyehuda.com/2009/09/25/mediawiki-limits-e20/

Alias

• MediaWiki
• TikiWiki vs MediaWiki
• Nobody ever got fired for picking MediaWiki