— John Pumford-Green 02/07/22 09:00

I have been thinking about moving to MediaWiki instead of Dokuwiki and decided to try it first to see if I preferred MediaWiki.

I installed MediaWiki on my sandbox server using the basic process that I later documented :

MediaWiki Install

I do like the look/feel of MediaWiki as a reader but the operation and maintenance as a user is very different to Dokuwiki.

It looked like there would be a steep learning curve, and a lot of functionality I'd added to Dokuwiki via plugins would not immediately be available. I also installed it on my main VPS server, and imported a few pages, and then did a lot of editing to get them to look right. It was going to take A LOT of work if I was to fully import this wiki over to MediaWiki.

There are some conversion scripts around to (partially) convert Dokuwiki formatted text into MediaWiki format, but they are far from perfect and the converted pages still need a lot of work.

After spending|wasting several hours I decided to abandon the idea of switching to MediaWiki and to stay using Dokuwiki. It does make a lot of sense - I'm comfortable with the syntax, it's much easier to backup, as all the pages are simply flat text files, adding functionality via plugins is much easier to do. It just works.

So, I've deleted/removed the MediaWiki install & MariaDB SQL server from the VPS machine. I might keep the Sandbox Server MediaWiki install, just to play with from time to time, but unless something serious happens I can't see any point in spending|wasting hours and hours trying to get my existing Wiki converted to MediaWiki, and then learning how best to organize a MediaWiki setup.