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I am planning on starting a specialized wiki. Having been a SE user for a while, I find reputation systems extremely useful and I would like my wiki to feature one.

I am looking for:

  1. A free and open source wiki platform similar to MediaWiki,
  2. that can be easily deployed on a server (I don't mind putting some effort, but I don't have the time or ability to get down to the nitty-gritty), and
  3. that features a reputation system.

Again, I do not mind putting some work into linking the wiki to a "reputation system computer", but I would need something "relatively easy" to put together.

The ideal piece of software I am looking for would be something like a pre-assembled combination of MediaWiki and WikiTrust, with some cosmetic inclusion of the reputation count into the wiki itself, similar to what we have on SE (at minimum, something that would clearly indicate users' reputation alongside their names).

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    I very much doubt such a thing exists. WikiTrust was the only mature MediaWiki reputation system and it has been dead for quite a while now. ORES has such aspirations I think, but for now focuses on scoring edits, not users. Also, probably not easily reusable for other wikis.
    – Tgr
    Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 0:24
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    Another MediaWiki extension that seemed to aspire to provide a reputation system is primelife.ercim.eu/results/opensource/…, but it looks as dead as WikiTrust.
    – Martin Van der Linden
    Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 3:25
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    WikiTrust was a university project which culminated in running the algorithm on Wikipedia's content and publishing the results. Presumably the researchers had no incentive to maintain the code and the necessary hardware after that, and the Wikimedia Foundation (which was previously considering to productize it) was distracted by new and troubling editor retention research and moved its focus elsewhere.
    – Tgr
    Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 19:58
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    As for reviving, well, update the code to account for the last five or so years of MediaWiki core changes, I guess? I haven't looked at it closely and don't know how deeply it is integrated with MediaWiki internals, but it's probably not a trivial task.
    – Tgr
    Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 20:03
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    In general, StackOverflow and MediaWiki have taken different paths. StackOverflow mostly relies on hard reputation systems where an algorithm scores your activity and determines what permissions you should hold. MediaWiki relies on soft reputation - decisions are almost always made by humans, permissions are granted through elections and approval discussions. Both have their advantages and disadvantages (software systems scale better, human systems are more innovative and empower the community more) but they don't mix very well IMO.
    – Tgr
    Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 20:08

2 Answers 2

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There are a few factors to take into account.

I've been working with various wikis for some time now from a plain vanilla MW to Atlassian Confluence, and have not yet come across one that would be easy to set up or maintain. The headache-free ones are always online spaces that cannot be installed on your server, and there is always a catch of some sort.

WikiTrust has been taken offline, indefinitely.

So it may not be a good idea to include it if there is not going to be support and updates for some time.

However, if you are looking for a way to provide your users with a knowledge base that can be crowdsourced and cnnot be abused by spammers, you could definitely leverage Discourse. It is created by the same Jeff Atwood who cofounded the StackExchange, he just took it to opensource.

It works really well at my present company and though not a wiki in its strictest sense, it is a splendid platform to share knowledge without having to take too much care of spam or vandalism.

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Knowen is another interesting solution.

The main feature that the developers argue makes Knowen different from a traditional wiki is the network structure of its pages.

However, the developers also list the following additional differences (quoted from here):

  • Asynchronous editing, allowing saving drafts and recalling nodes from slow editors
  • Intuitive Markdown editor
  • Ability to follow pages, subgraphs of nodes, other users
  • User profile, reputations

The platform indeed has a decent -- if rudimentary -- built-in reputation system which is described here.

However, although Knowen offers free access to their Amazon server deployment of the platform for "academic and personal use", it does not seem to be open source.

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