Manual:Deciding which wiki software to use/it

Dopo aver analizzato i pro e i contro di un sito web di tipo wiki ed aver concluso che esso rappresenta la scelta migliore per il tuo sito, il prossimo passo è determinare quale software wiki utilizzare. MediaWiki, essendo uno dei più popolare software applicativi wiki, è una delle scelte più ovvie da considerare.

Vantaggi di MediaWiki

 * Manutenzione e supporto a lungo termine: Lo sviluppo di MediaWiki è sostenuto da un'organizzazione con un budget annuale superiore ai 27 milioni di dollari. Non c'è motivo di preoccuparsi che in un futuro prossimo il codebase possa essere abbandonato dai suoi sviluppatori e non venire più mantenuto.
 * Capacità di gestire wiki enormi ed altamente attive: MediaWiki is used by the English Wikipedia, the largest wiki in the world, with more than 4 million pages, 600 million edits since the project's inception, and 470 million unique visitors monthly. MediaWiki has been designed with scalability in mind for high-usage, high-profile sites that are prone to vandalism, spam, and other attacks.
 * Lots of content to borrow: Whatever sorts of articles or templates (e.g. infoboxes) you are used to seeing on Wikipedia and think would be useful on your site, you can import. Often the starting place for a new wiki is to borrow content from Wikipedia (subject to the CC BY-SA license). If you use wiki software other than MediaWiki, the Wikipedia content might have to be reformatted or you might have to start from scratch.

Disadvantages of MediaWiki

 * Complexity: MediaWiki is complex to set up and maintain. You have to install and configure MediaWiki (including installing and configuring whatever extensions you want), which can be a major task, especially for the inexperienced. There may be quite a lot of content you need to either import from other wikis or design yourself, such as the content of your MediaWiki: namespaces (e.g. and ), and so on. At least twice a year, a new MediaWiki version comes out. If you want to continue borrowing new content from Wikipedia, you will sometimes have to upgrade MediaWiki and its extensions and/or install new extensions that Wikimedia has introduced. Installing, configuring, and upgrading MediaWiki and its extensions is not always a simple one-click affair.
 * Inconsistent quality of documentation: MediaWiki's documentation is still a work in progress that depends primarily on volunteer efforts; it arguably is not in a very good state yet.