Why MediaWiki is a better internal-documentation platform than Confluence
- Fully open-source and free to use.
- Lower hardware requirements to run.
- Redirects: Tha MediaWiki system of redirects is vastly simpler to use/create/manage than that of Confluence. It allows wonderful things like creating redirects all-over-the-place to point to the same articles.
- Built-in statistics: Statistics such as "wanted pages" where MediaWiki reports what people tried to find, but did not are extremely helpful. Analyzing these - along with the ability to create redirects so simply allows an administrator to quickly see that someone may have been looking up "How to configure SSH" meanwhile you have a page that is "SSH Client Configuration". Create a redirect right then and there and if anyone else ever thinks the same way that person does - they are still immediately finding the correct results.
- Search: Try searching for something in both. I have no idea why it is so bad, but I've had many times where searching for exact article titles in Confluence or using specific quoted-phrases returns nothing - even though the pages exist. I've never experienced failures like that in MediaWiki. Also, MediaWiki feels significantly faster to return search results (and those results are more quality).
- Handling of text, code, markdown, etc. Again - it's a "feeling" - but to me the MediaWiki ways of handling code, markdown, rich-editing, etc are all way simpler to use and faster. I've never had MediaWiki (except if I missed a char in making a table) completely hose-up the rendering of a page. I've had Conflueunce do absolutely bonkers things when trying to mix text and code, etc.
