Wiki feature wanted

[xela]

I posed this question on MIT zephyr last week, and was surprised to receive no replies. So now I'm spreading the net a little wider:

I am once again having the "searching our wiki mostly produces bitrot"
problem.  Does anyone know of a wiki with a --- let's call it
"archive" --- feature?  Such that, e.g., a user can mark click an
"archive this page" button, and it will thenceforth be excluded from
search results unless the "include archived pages in search results"
box is checked....

The extent to which my grumbling-under-my-breath about the Wiki at my new job resembles my grumbling-under-my-breath about the Wiki at my old job — and about every other non-curated Wiki that's been in operation more than two or three years that I've ever tried to extract information from — is really striking, and I can't be the first person to notice the commonalities: Wikis that are maintained by their users accrue bitrot, and after a few years, searches on subjects you'd expect (or maybe even know outright) there to be current information on starts to yield out-of-date information.* To the point where the feature I describe above seems to me like an obvious one for someone to code into even a pretty minimally-featured Wiki. So, does anyone know of such a thing?

---

* Which is not to deny the possibility that Wikis may also all have terrible search algorithms. Perhaps so. But it certainly can't help that so much of the material they're searching is inherently useless.

Comments

[mary-anne wolf (from livejournal.com)]

It looks as if Confluence does what you want, although for commercial users it costs money.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/features (https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/features)

[jered]

Hacker Barbie says, "Documentation is hard!"

I don't know of a way of maintaining a good wiki that doesn't require the same effort as maintaining documentation -- a good portion of a FTE doc manager's time. Of course, no business wants to devote that much money to "just an internal tool", so the cobbler's children continue to go shoeless.

What you're describing, though, sounds like a really easy MediaWiki hack. MediaWiki, by default, only searches its main "namespace". The default search page has an "advanced" box that allows you to select other namespaces, and even includes the delightful note, "Note: Only some namespaces are searched by default. Try prefixing your query with all: to search all content (including talk pages, templates, etc), or use the desired namespace as prefix."

It sounds like an easy exercise for the reader (or perhaps Google) to add a button to your default style that moves the current page to the Archive namespace. Or you can just use the existing "move" button, which requires only a slight amount of typing (destination "Archive:pagename") and no coding at all.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I'm pretty sure media wiki can do this. Also on media wiki, use of categories to mark things as obsolete.