Why MediaWiki

I used Microsoft OneNote as my primary note-taking app for over ten years. When I decided to switch to a wiki-based system, I looked at Confluence, Notion, Obsidian, and others.

Ideal Criteria

• Widely adopted
• Open source
• Not owned by a commercial vendor
• A platform that could be deployed to a scalable infrastructure
• No advertisement or selling/sharing of user data
• Minimal formatting options: the goal is to capture and organize ideas - not to make them look pretty. I didn't want to spend a lot of time formatting.
• Customizable
• Infinitely scalable

MediaWiki has already solved many difficult problems: version history, user accounts, templates, categories, search, structured data extensions, VisualEditor, and a mature ecosystem.