Wiki Engine

A wiki engine is a type of general-purpose documentation platform which embraces the principle of shared responsibility and prioritizes the tents of emergent structure, connected content, and minimal secrecy, by allowing users to link words and text fragments with new and existing content in a quick and easy manner. This approach allows building a documentation base in a collaborative and organic fashion.

Wiki engines are further categorized as:

Open source wiki engines: their source code can be downloaded and they can be deeply customized by the DocOps engineer, especially in terms of UI extensions. In addition, when running locally, headless automation workflows may be created directly against the underlying database.
Proprietary wiki engines: they are closed source and offered—in most cases —as cloud-based services. Customization and automation is performed by APIs, plug-ins, extensions, or a combination thereof.

The concept of wikis (wiki means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian) was invented by Ward Cunningham when he launched the first wiki software called WikiWikiWeb; however, the paradigm achieved mainstream awareness thanks to Wikipedia.

The key differences between most open and source and proprietary wiki engines do not only lie in their availability of source code, or cost, but in the degree to which they align to some documentation system tenets:

	Open Source	Proprietary
Minimal secrecy	Default wiki paradigm	Supported via SSO but a combination of information security dogma and budget limitations—most vendors charge by user—may result in this tenet not being honored.
Uniform addressability	Partially aligned (human-friendly URIs)	This is hit and miss depending on the product. Some completely violate this tenet by producing garbled URIs based on database primary keys or UUIDs.
Flat namespace	Default wiki paradigm	Proprietary products encourage the placement of content into silos (named by domain, team, project, etc.), leading to the formation of information islands. Some products lack the notion of a top, flat namespace altogether.
Contemporary prompt	Minimal alignment in most cases (rudimentary search)	Most products are or are in the process of implementing a contemporary prompt.
Authoring delight	Minimal alignment in most cases (crude text editors with no live preview)	Most products offer a contemporary WYSIYWG but this may be sometimes detrimental, preventing accurate, low-level editing.
Embedding and blending	Minimal alignment in most cases; however, when embedding is supported there tends to be a greater focus on blending.	Most products differentiate themselves by the number of proprietary systems (e.g., JIRA) that can embed content from, however, blending capabilities could be poorer.

Alignment to other tenets is not necessarily specific to the open or proprietary nature of the wiki engine under consideration. For example, both proprietary and open source wiki engines, unlike static site generators, typically offer poor alignment to the tenet of decoupled rendering.