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I have been neglecting documentation lately, mostly because I didn't have enough time. On the other hand, I regularly have people asking me to translate the documentation into a different language - but adding more languages currently means more effort on my side every time something needs to be changed in the documentation. So I am starting thinking about a wiki that could take over the functions of Textpattern, with exception of Blog/Announcements/Development builds sections. Ideally it would be customizable in such a way that upgrades don't turn into a nightmare every time.

Does anybody have experience with a multi-language capable wiki application? I guess MediaWiki is an obvious candidate - but last time I checked it was a horrible mess. MDC seems to have made good experience with MindTouch - yet the download of MindTouch Core contains an entire virtual machine, this might be "slightly" overdimensioned. Any other suggestions?

For a few years I tested Dokuwiki. It's a wiki that doesn't work with data base (all data are located in files). Long time I practice it, I should install it locally to see if it works good. If it does, then I believe the migration would be easier since you have just to copy/paste the html code of your pages in the dokuwiki pages (but i guess this should be possible in every wiki application)...

I don't think I want a wiki based on files - those are typically not very flexible. Also, I would like to convert Textpattern markup into the markup of that wiki - "pasting" HTML code will make the pages hard to edit. Syntax documentation of DokuWiki mentions the ability to embed HTML and PHP code directly. The idea is probably that only administrators will change pages, giving everybody that kind of power is rather risky (security-wise).

Do you know Wikimatrix ? Here's the comparison of Dokuwiki and Mediawiki : http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/DokuWiki+MediaWiki
As you can see, Textile is supported by Dokuwiki

Perhaps you may wish to take a look at ikiwiki. What is very nice about it is that it is implemented at the top of a version control system (of your choice). You can manipulate the pages of the wiki directly from your vcs, with all the power that it implies.

Don't be discouraged by the ultra-spartan design of the homepage - you can easily customize the look.

Textile is supported natively. Users include the Cairo library, Keith Packard, or Monotone.

ziutek, sounds interesting. It supports Mercurial, seems that it can sync to http://hg.mozdev.org/adblockplus/file/tip/www/ out of the box.

TikiWiki (used by support.mozilla.com) seems to be a good candidate. On the first glance, the only real problem - it is a big system, probably too much functionality for our use case. I'll need to do a test installation to see whether this is really an issue. And of course it begs for having the forum migrated to it as well. And while I would certainly like to get rid of phpBB, migrating the forum would require significantly more effort.

PS: Going through WikiMatrix and removing wikis that didn't meet requirements only left one contender in the end: bitweaver

Wladimir Palant wrote:And of course it begs for having the forum migrated to it as well. And while I would certainly like to get rid of phpBB, migrating the forum would require significantly more effort.

I wouldn't advise replacing the forum with anything like the Firefox Support Forums. They've been so problematic that I gave up trying to give any support there. Yeah, I know, I don't give much support here either, but your more frequent helpers may be more productive in the current one.

The problem with the current forum - I am not very productive here
Upgrading it takes simply too long because of all the hacks I had to add so I'll gladly dump it for something that has a proper plugin API (and maybe is even well-written to start with). Of course that will only happen if the alternative is good enough.

Oh, I hadn't realized administrating/upgrading phpBB had become problematic. I'm sorry I don't have any expertise which could be helpful. I hope you're able to find an alternative which is less time-consuming.

Why don't you ask someone with technical knowledge and spare time to deal with the forum software? You would then be free to deal with the posts.

I am somewhat wary of giving anybody permission to upload code to my server. On the other hand, this isn't impossible if a good candidate is found. So far nobody stepped up (granted, this post is way too long and possible candidates most likely didn't even read to that point).

Btw, I took a look at bitweaver yesterday. From what I can tell, it is modular and the code is reasonably clean. However, it has a relatively small group of contributors who don't seem to have much time for further development. Also, my first impression was that user interfaces don't get proper treatment, not the most user-friendly solution you can imagine. TikiWiki on the other hand is being very actively developed with Mozilla contributing as well. User interfaces are ok (again, first impression). However, the code base is monolitic which is very scary with that amount of functionality. Also, code quality varies throughout the project and I am scared by the number of buzzwordy abstraction layers they are using (in the end it has to run on this server without using too much of its resources).

I stumbled upon Anwiki today. I don't know why it fell through when I checked WikiMatrix results - it looks very promising, exactly what we need. Clean and simple code, no unnecessary features, strong support for easy maintenance of multiple language versions. Good extensibility, adding any features we need shouldn't be a problem. I'll try installing it and importing existing content.

It looks that Anwiki entry was only recently added to WikiMatrix (20th Jan), so that may explain why you missed it.
Anwiki does not seem to have many contributors and support community, but certainly the features provided (e.g. auto sync) look very promising.
Was wondering if you have looked at sites that are already using Anwiki to see few examples?