Simon Willison’s Weblog

otterwiki (via) It's been a while since I've seen a new-ish Wiki implementation, and this one by Ralph Thesen is really nice. It's written in Python (Flask + SQLAlchemy + mistune for Markdown + GitPython) and keeps all of the actual wiki content as Markdown files in a local Git repository.

The installation instructions are a little in-depth as they assume a production installation with Docker or systemd - I figured out this recipe for trying it locally using uv:

git clone https://github.com/redimp/otterwiki.git
cd otterwiki

mkdir -p app-data/repository
git init app-data/repository

echo "REPOSITORY='${PWD}/app-data/repository'" >> settings.cfg
echo "SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI='sqlite:///${PWD}/app-data/db.sqlite'" >> settings.cfg
echo "SECRET_KEY='$(echo $RANDOM | md5sum | head -c 16)'" >> settings.cfg

export OTTERWIKI_SETTINGS=$PWD/settings.cfg
uv run --with gunicorn gunicorn --bind 127.0.0.1:8080 otterwiki.server:app

# 9th October 2024, 3:22 pm / flask, git, python, sqlalchemy, sqlite, markdown, wikis, uv

Thematic map—GIS Wiki. This is a really useful wiki full of GIS information, and the coverage of different types of thematic maps is particularly thorough.

# 21st October 2019, 2:25 am / geospatial, visualization, wikis

GiantBomb.com. Launched today, powered by Django—a combination of (mostly ex-Gamespot) quality editorial content and a massive structured wiki of every computer game ever released. This is going to be a lot of fun—all of the crazy detailed content that Wikipedia tends to reject.

# 22nd July 2008, 7:09 am / django, games, giantbomb, wikipedia, wikis

Jottit. Aaron Swartz’s latest venture: a complete rethink of the Infogami concept. Well worth checking out for the extremely thoughtful way it introduces features, and the way account creation with a password remains optional until you want to add access control.

# 16th September 2007, 9:43 pm / aaron-swartz, authentication, bitbots, infogami, jottit, usability, userflow, wikis

wikimarkup (via) “MediaWiki markup in Python”. I’ve always suspected that MediaWiki was like Perl; the only thing that can parse MediaWiki is MediaWiki. Not sure how faithful this Python port is but I’d love my theory to be proved wrong.

# 9th September 2007, 12:33 am / cursegaming, david-cramer, mediawiki, perl, python, wikimarkup, wikis

Wikispaces OpenID Support. You can create new accounts there, but they haven’t hooked up association with existing accounts yet (that’s coming soon).

# 19th July 2007, 9:23 am / openid, wikispaces, wikis

The Facebook Platform wiki (via) Not very well promoted yet.

# 13th June 2007, 8:52 am / f8, facebook, wikis

Wikipatterns. Great idea this: a wiki documenting patterns for successfully growing your own wiki.

# 17th February 2007, 12:51 am / atlassian, patterns, wikis

SubWiki (via) A wiki that uses Subversion for its data repository, implemented as a Python CGI.

# 16th December 2006, 7:19 pm / cgi, python, subversion, wikis

Google Code gets wikis and file downloads. Someone finally wrote a project wiki that stores its pages inside the Subversion repository.

# 16th December 2006, 12:35 pm / google, google-code, subversion, wikis

An S3 AJAX Wiki. Les continues to innovate against S3.

# 22nd April 2006, 7:09 pm / ajax, aws, javascript, les-orchard, s3, wikis

InfoWorld: Year of the enterprise Wiki (via) Wikis for business collaboration make a whole ton of sense.

# 6th January 2005, 4:42 pm / jon-udell, wikis