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Wikis (Self-Hosted)

Self-hosted, MediaWiki-style wikis are the older, DIY approach to team documentation — the same open-source engine that powers Wikipedia, run on a company's own servers. Maintained by the open-source MediaWiki community, they're free and open-source, and still hold around 10.4% usage share (roughly #12 among documentation tools) at organizations that run their own infrastructure. Teams reach for them when they want full control over hosting, data residency, and customization that hosted SaaS wikis don't offer.

Quick facts
Type: Self-hosted wiki engine (page-based documentation with revision history)
Made by: Open-source community (e.g. the MediaWiki Foundation)
Cost: Free / open-source (self-hosted — you pay only for your own server)
Best for: Organizations that want full control over their documentation infrastructure and data
Primary use case: Internal team knowledge bases, engineering runbooks, and long-lived reference documentation

Jump to: Example Getting started Best for

Example

MediaWiki pages use their own lightweight markup — double brackets for internal links, equals signs for headers, and templates for reusable snippets.

== Deployment Runbook ==

'''Owner:''' Platform Team <br>
'''Last reviewed:''' 2026-07-15

=== Steps ===
# SSH into the bastion host
# Run deploy.sh production
# Watch the [[Monitoring Dashboard|Grafana dashboard]] for errors

See also: [[API Gateway Config]], [[Rollback Procedure]]

{{Warning|Never deploy on a Friday afternoon.}}

Getting started

Install the MediaWiki software on any LAMP-style server (or via Docker), point it at a MySQL/MariaDB database, and start creating pages through the web UI.

# Docker: run a local MediaWiki instance
docker run --name wiki -p 8080:80 -d mediawiki

# then visit the setup wizard
http://localhost:8080/index.php

Best for: Engineering orgs with existing self-hosting infrastructure and strict data-residency or compliance requirements, who don't want to hand internal documentation to a third-party SaaS provider.