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Stage | Plan |
Maturity | Viable |
Content Last Reviewed | 2023-02-23 |
Thanks for visiting the Wiki category direction page in GitLab. This page belongs to the Knowledge group of the Plan stage and is maintained by Matthew Macfarlane (E-Mail). More information about the Knowledge group's priorities and direction can be found on the Knowledge group direction page.
This strategy is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute to it:
GitLab Wikis are a great way to share documentation and organize information via built-in functionality. Each GitLab project includes a Wiki rendered by Gollum, and backed by a Git repository. Premium and Ultimate customers also have a group-level Wiki for consolidating documentation across multiple projects or teams.
Walkthrough of GitLab wikis (starts at 9 minutes):
We want the wiki to serve as a single source of truth for project- or group-level documentation that is approachable and easily accessibly by anyone. As we look to future plans, we will be exploring ways to encourage collaboration across all personas by improving the editing and navigation experience.
Our primary persona is Sasha, the Software Developer, but all personas can use Wikis for storing information and everyone should be able to quickly and easily contribute to a wiki page. As the wiki matures, we may need to investigate other, non-developer personas as our research found they are frequent users of wikis.
We are currently working on migrating the backend wiki functionality to native Gitaly RPCs, an effort that will bring performance and stability improvements and make it easier to maintain long-term.
Afterward, however, we will only be prioritizing high-impact bug fixes and maintenance. The next areas we will focus on when we are able to increase investment in Wiki again are:
We know that our new WYSIWYG Markdown editor can support real-time collaborative editing, but we may need an entirely new backend to support collaborative editing of Wiki pages. Ideally, we want to solve the problem of collaborative note taking, be highly approachable for everyone, but also offer the tremendous benefits of storing the content in a portable plain text format that can be cloned, viewed and edited locally (properties of Git). However, we are not actively working on a new architecture that can support this experience.
Wiki was recently transitioned from Create Stage to Plan Stage in GitLab. The future direction of Wiki, as a result of this transition, is being evaluated. Prior to this change Wiki was in Maintenance Mode.
We currently most closely compete with GitHub Wikis but we would like to compete with:
We've heard from customers that managing wikis with tens of thousands of pages can be challenging. And while a full-featured product like Confluence has advanced features and integrations, the GitLab wiki would be a stronger competitor if we fixed some low-hanging fruit related to page title and redirects and improved the functionality of the sidebar to aide navigation.
GitLab does not have any organization-wide wikis, but some teams do use them for various purposes.