When comparing DocBook vs MediaWiki, the Slant community recommends MediaWiki for most people. In the question“What are the best markup languages?” MediaWiki is ranked 8th while DocBook is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose MediaWiki is:
Mediawiki is a widely used wiki engine. It is used to power Wikipedia and thus most people will be more comfortable/accustomed to using MediaWiki.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful and possessing a very rich vocabulary
Pro XSL stylesheets
Can produce good-looking output in PDF, HTML or ePub through the use of the Docbook XSL stylesheets, which are not difficult to customize.
Pro Easy to extend
Pro The de facto standard
Mediawiki is a widely used wiki engine. It is used to power Wikipedia and thus most people will be more comfortable/accustomed to using MediaWiki.
Pro It has a powerful templating system
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under GPL.
Pro Version control
MediaWiki allows viewing past revisions of pages.
Pro It has a usable WYSIWYG editor
Pro Thanks to Wikipedia it is thoroughly documented
Pro Runs on any PHP server
It requires a webserver running PHP 5.2 or later of any kind.
Pro Great multilingual support
MediaWiki has full support for over 65 languages and partial support for over 300.
Pro Multiple database support
MediaWiki can store data in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQLite databases.
Cons
Con Hard to learn
Because of its complexity and large vocabulary and complicated toolchain, it is hard to learn.
Con Access control requires an extension
There is no built-in access control, but you can download an extension for ACL.