When comparing MediaWiki vs DokuWiki, the Slant community recommends DokuWiki for most people. In the question“What are the best multi-user wikis?” DokuWiki is ranked 1st while MediaWiki is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose DokuWiki is:
To install you need a webserver running PHP 5.2 or later where you unpack the downloaded archive and navigate to install.php in your browser, fill out the necessary information required for the one-page installer and you are done.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Easy to set up and mantain
To install you need a webserver running PHP 5.2 or later where you unpack the downloaded archive and navigate to install.php in your browser, fill out the necessary information required for the one-page installer and you are done.
Pro Local and open source
Local...
Pro Plain-text file storage
Dokuwiki does not require a database, it stores everything in plain-text.
Pro Version control
Dokuwik offers unlimited page revisions.
Pro Access control
DokuWiki has built-in ACL support.
Pro Runs on any PHP server
It requires a webserver running PHP 5.2 or later of any kind.
Pro A dedicated page for recent changes
A dedicated page to quickly note what has changed recently can be set up.
Pro Search functionality
DokuWiki allows searching through pages.
Pro Very last, consuming very few Local
Local....
Pro Good selection of plugins
DokuWiki offers over a thousand plugins to extend its functionality.
Pro Good selection of themes
DokuWiki offers over a hundred templates to change the visual appearance of the site.
Cons
Con Access control requires an extension
There is no built-in access control, but you can download an extension for ACL.
Con Lots of plugins to manage
DokuWiki is highly modular. Even thing like WYSIWYG editors and categories have to be added separately as plugins. This can quickly lead to managing lots of plugins.