[sfaf]

My company uses Confluence as well. It's been really useful - we use the Q&A and also document features a LOT. It makes sense since we are mostly on the Atlassian stack (JIRA, & Confluence)

Previously we used Google Docs. However, in every company I've worked at I've seen this tool fail. People start of using it but after a while people forget. The main issue I think is that docs lacks key capabilities in discoverability, search, and engagement; essentially confluence does a way better job of pulling our team back in so we "remember" to use it again. We have a senior manager who is addicted to the Q&A feature and looks at it daily to help answer questions from our team.

The main tools I've seen consistently fail in large orgs for documentation has been Google Docs, Google Sites, and Wikis. All of these fail in the "living" component of "living documentation". They tend to be places where you write and things die / don't get updated / are never seen.

[gtf21]

Why do you think Google Sites or Wikis fail where Confluence succeeds? I've never used Confluence (and don't really like Atlassian products in general), but am willing to try it.

Have been playing with Google Sites and the main thing I'm worried about is portability if I should choose to go with something else. It seems hard to export.

[sfaf]

The main issue with Google Sites is there's a much higher level of friction for creating documents and then more importantly it's much more difficult to find things (search is way better on Confluence).

I can't speak as much on Wikis as a category but the ones I've seen at orgs are difficult to set up and manage. I have also found that non-technical people have more trouble using Wikis that Confluence.

[tropo]

Comparing Confluence to MediaWiki...

Confluence lacks categories. You are stuck with hierarchy. It's more like filesystem directory structure than tags. This gets awful once you have a lot of stuff.

Confluence does not provide direct wikitext access. You might not think you need direct access, but then one day you want to turn a bunch of data into a big table.

Confluence, obviously, doesn't scale as well as MediaWiki. Nothing does. You'd hate to find yourself needing to migrate from Confluence's closed ecosystem over to MediaWiki once you hit the limits.

Confluence lacks the familiarity of MediaWiki. Pretty much everybody has seen MediaWiki in action on Wikipedia. This is comforting. People know what to expect from MediaWiki.

[gtf21]

I assume you would say the same with Google Sites then? I've always found MediaWiki a bit of a pain to work with, but would definitely prefer more of an open ecosystem to a closed one.

Is there good hosted MediaWiki? I have too much other infrastructure to run and would rather not have to run more myself.

[hitsurume]

Can MediaWiki create a layer of separation between users? IE only users in group "Engineering" can see that groups documents while all users can see group "AllCompany" documents?