Elixir alternative to mediawiki?

Hello, and welcome to this awesome community.

I am very, and I really mean it – VERY interested in your project. I am an archivist by soul and a senior programmer by profession. Jokes aside, I love programming. But I quite like information archiving in general.

Lately I am working on bringing in a more contemporary sqlite support to Elixir. There’s a good library but it doesn’t support Ecto 3 which is the upgraded and better version of Ecto 2, which is a data mapper library, or an ORM if you will. Since Elixir is dynamically typed (still strongly typed but not checked at compile time) I’m also pondering adding a stricter typing to my library to make things a bit safer in general. Especially if you keep in mind that sqlite is weakly, or rather, value-typed, and not as strict as Postgres.

Where I am getting with this is that I very much would like to author a Wiki-like software in Elixir, backed by Ecto – which in combination with my other effort, will open it up for being backed by sqlite as well (not only by Postgres and MySQL which are the best supported DB backends for Ecto).

I happen to believe Wikis are way too huge and bloated software packages in general and I’m seeking to bring Elixir’s speed to this area (I mean, it’s not the speediest language but it’s definitely beating Ruby, Python and PHP, and sometimes JS). Fault tolerance and transparent parallelism, too. Elixir is also quite lightweight.

Between Elixir’s releases (self-contained packages) and sqlite (serverless DB) I think Wikis can be made very lean and mean. I’d love working on that.

Dimitar,
This is great! My interest is in what I name “humanumerism”, i.e. the way people can take advantage of new tech in the today life.

I started with that idea and the need for an intl network to support the first people and small corps being able to be interested in … 1977. I selected Tymnet to work with (other four I knew off were US ARPANET and French Gov Cyclades, and French Transpac and US Telenet). Tymnet was the only one thinking deep networking (inter processus).

We made it 100% of the public packet switch international services before we were purchased and reduced to the Internet by McDonnell Douglas. My own job was “extended services”, i.e. “the layers above” the 7 OSI layers (in network data processing) while TCP/IP was only 4 lower layers. So I left and tried to build a functional architecture transparent to lower layers in extending QNX. This was very promising but it required dedicated (proprietary) QNX machines.

So I worked (some in the IETF would call it fought) on standardization precautionary concepts to keep the layers above (language, semantic, etc.) independent. In the process I used wikis to document things. More and more wikis as it became clear that the need is for an inter process and human interdisciplinary ontology and a replacement for the concept of only one version "document.” I name it the concept “perligent” (a Cicero’s idea), not the document the author sends, but what the destiny receives, after many may have (directly, indirectly, in parallel) contributed to. Like one does when composing an RFC.

I started publishing one per topic of interest of mine. I named it a “blik” (bliki, book in line, a can of data in Danish/German) and I have 00s I need to sort :-). I focused on the needs I have and anyone working home/independently/in groups may have. You are right: SQLite to be portable, using smart pages, each being independent in the person’s or community’s neb (private nebularity with a gateway on the web). From my QNX days, I know that Erlang/elixir IS the right solution for people (I do not need big power) with a good DNS like (IETF calls it DDDS), a simple accepted (set of) page formats. etc.

I happen to be in Montpellier, France, where there is a university lab which works on smart archiving issues, interdisciplinarity, etc. and the action you do when you write, read what you wrote, formated on the screen, adapt it and mark-it up simultaneously. I am a member of the national archivist’s association.

My idea is to build an entire personal environment to write, read, archive, work, manage, publish, administer, live with it, etc. for a person/couple/family/home/small business under beam. So it can be installed and run the same everywhere. I know it is a huge task. I also know that you cannot succeed it with non-functional architecture. The question is: is it feasible? Technically, and in the open source? I learned a few things in my life, I try to build a team to learn “erlix” (http://erlix.fr), tried to set-up a meet-up to jointly train… Did not rise interest enough, yet! I am trying my last bet: a $10 LLC "senior entreprise,” next week.

Hi @jfc, and welcome to the forum.

I’m not aware of any wiki engines built in Elixir / Phoenix (after a brief search, but I’ve also been snooping around these forums for a while and think I would have noticed). The gitgud (GitGud, GitHub clone entirely written in Elixir) has wiki on the to-do list.

MediaWiki is a pretty big codebase so your pathway forward will depend on how you use it and the user base. Search the forums for CMS - you might get inspired by something that isn’t a wiki, but is close enough for what you need (e.g. Changelog.com is open source or GitHub - infinitered/thesis-phoenix: A lightweight, bolt-on, intuitive content editing system for Elixir/Phoenix websites. Star this repo and follow along with our progress! · GitHub).

Converting to/from MediaWiki markup format shouldn’t be too bad, so don’t let that hold you back. Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) has all kinds of conversion options if you don’t want to code your own. It’s pretty fast too. I use it for quite a few documentation related things - e.g. I can write MS Word docs without using MS Word.

As it happens, John MacFarlane, who wrote pandoc, also wrote a Haskell based wiki - GitHub - jgm/gitit: A wiki using HAppS, pandoc, and git · GitHub