- ThurWiki
- Features
What is different. And what stays the same.
Spaces, page tree, versions, comments, templates: you already have those. What follows is where ThurWiki goes further, and where it deliberately does exactly what your present wiki does. The pictures come from the demo wiki of “Muster Elektro AG”.
Finding the page you know exists.
The most common complaint about Confluence is its search. ThurWiki searches titles, text and the content of attachments, by sound and by meaning.
- Right into the attachment. What stands in an attached quotation can be found through a figure inside it, without opening it. Office files, PDF even as a scan, images containing text, e-mails, source code, CAD, and the contents of archives.
- By sound and by meaning. Meier finds Maier, "emergency power" finds the page about the generator. A typing mistake does not leave an empty list.
- Only what you may see. A space somebody has not been given access to does not turn up, not even as a title.
One editor, one format, no cut-off date.
Confluence switched off its old editor; at one company 85’000 out of 110’000 pages were affected. ThurWiki has one editor and one document format. What you write today stays in the same document format; there is no forced migration.
A ribbon like Word's.
HOME, INSERT, TABLE. Keyboard shortcuts, no markup. Anyone who can use Word is writing on the first day.
Tables like Confluence's. Plus three things.
Merge and split cells, header row, header column, cell background. And while reading: sort, filter, number.
A search field per table.
It hides what does not match and counts the hits. A price list with three hundred rows becomes usable, without an app.
A chart from the table above it.
Bars, line, pie, several series, values on the chart. Change the table and the charts change with it. No add-on.
Writing at the same time
Several people on the same page, with cursors in their own colour. No overwriting one another and no page lock whose release anyone has to wait for.
Placing images freely
Left, right, with text flowing around, with a border and a caption. Cropping and annotating in the browser, with a version history.
Markdown in and out
The assistant and the API speak Markdown; Markdown files are imported. For the people who would rather type in the editor than click.
Approvals, versions, comments: without a marketplace.
In Confluence an approval workflow usually needs an app with its own price per user. In ThurWiki it is a right: whoever may suggest but not write submits a change.
Four eyes on every change
The approver sees the comparison and decides. If the page has changed in the meantime, the wiki says so. It supports document control under ISO 9001 and ISO 27001: who approved it appears in the history, with the time.
Versions with comparison
Every save is a version. Restoring creates a new version holding the old content; the history stays complete.
Comments on the text
On a marked passage or at the foot of the page, answered and marked done. Notification by e-mail, Telegram or WhatsApp, chosen per person.
Five things that keep a wiki in order over the years.
Tasks that gather themselves.
Checklists sit in the minutes, and are ticked off while reading. The macro Tasks of a user collects the open items from every page. Nobody transfers anything by hand.
One paragraph, five pages, one source.
"Include excerpt" shows a piece of another page at the moment it is displayed. A copy would quietly go out of date. It corresponds to excerpt-include in Confluence.
Pages that quietly go stale.
Per page a responsible person, a review date and, if you want, a repetition. When the date arrives, a notice stands at the top of the page – for everyone who opens it – and the responsible person is reminded. Confirming is one click.
Who is responsible is written on it.
Mentions, contributors (counted from the versions), pages of a user, user lists. Drawn from the wiki, not typed out.
What was said is there beside it.
The macro Voice note or meeting records in the browser or takes over a recording from a telephone, a dictation machine or conferencing software. A player appears on the page, on request with a transcript by Whisper in your own house or by ChatGPT. For the minutes, for the fault report on site, for the handover on standby duty.
Images with a licence, drawings in our own house.
- Image search across nine archives. Wikimedia Commons and Openverse without a key; Pixabay, Unsplash, Pexels, Freepik, Adobe Stock, Getty and iStock with your own account. Every thumbnail with source, author and licence; when it is inserted, the attribution is written along with it.
- draw.io on our own server. Network diagrams and flowcharts stay editable and stay sharp. Confluence needs a third-party app for this.
- Editing in the browser. A quick tool for cropping, arrows and blurring; an image editor with layers for everything else. Every edit is a new version.
- Generating images where no suitable photograph exists. For title pictures, not for circuit diagrams; a generated image looks convincing and is wrong all the same.
What deliberately stays the same.
A migration should not make everything new. Confluence users find these things where they expect them.
Chosen pages as one PDF.
The manual for the audit, the instruction for the engineer with no signal, the extract for the customer: tick what should come along, and out comes one document.
- Two boxes per row. The first takes the page, the second the page with everything beneath it. Across spaces, up to 300 pages per export; each one begins on a new sheet, in the order of the page tree.
- You decide the size. A drop-down from 45 to 100 per cent, for type and content at once: small when a wide table has to fit on one sheet, large when it will be read at a table.
- Exactly as the page looks. What is printed is the real view, not a second rendering: macros, charts, draw.io drawings and tables stand in the PDF as they do in the browser. An export that knows only the server side would show empty macros.
- With your rights. A page you are not allowed to read stops the export rather than quietly going missing. An export that silently drops pages would be worse than one that never arrives.
- No lock-in. On top of that, every page as Markdown through the API, with attachments. And we say what is missing too: there is no bulk export of the whole wiki as an archive today.
Questions about the features
Does the search find content inside attached files?
Yes. Titles, text and the content of attached PDF, Word and Excel files. By sound (Cologne phonetics, Soundex) and by meaning (embeddings), so that a typing mistake does not leave you with an empty list. Only what you are allowed to see is found; everything else does not appear, not even as a title.
What can the editor do that Confluence cannot?
While reading: sort tables, filter them with a search field, number the rows as you go, without editing the page. While writing: merge and split cells, header row and header column, cell background, just as you know it from Confluence. On top of that, charts from the table above and Excel attachments as real tables. And: there is no second editor that everyone will be moved to one day.
Are there approvals without an add-on?
Yes. Whoever may suggest but not write creates a suggestion with every save. The approver sees the comparison and decides. If the page has changed in the meantime, the wiki says so. That is how the wiki supports document control under ISO 9001 and ISO 27001: who approved it appears in the history, with the time.
What happens when two people edit at once?
Several people write on the same page, with visible cursors in their own colour. The changes flow continuously into the same document. Nobody overwrites anybody else, nobody waits for a page lock to be released, and there is no conflict for anyone to resolve.
Can I record a meeting and have it transcribed?
Yes, with the macro "Voice note or meeting". You record in the browser or upload a finished recording (MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG, WebM), from a telephone, a dictation machine or your conferencing software. A player appears on the page. Optionally, speech recognition writes it out: through Whisper in your own house or through ChatGPT (OpenAI). The transcript appears before insertion in a field where you check names and technical terms. Swiss German is written out in standard German when the language is set to "de". Audio and transcript become attachments of the page: whoever may see the page can hear the recording, and the search finds the transcript. Those present should know that a recording is being made. With ChatGPT the audio leaves the house, with Whisper in your own house it does not.
Can I export pages?
Yes, in two ways. In the interface: export pages as PDF – you tick in the page tree what should come along, per row either the page alone or the page with all its sub-pages, across spaces, up to 300 pages in one PDF. What is printed is the view you see, so with macros, charts and draw.io drawings, and only with your rights: a page you are not allowed to read stops the export rather than quietly going missing. Through the API: every page as Markdown, with attachments.
Wiki software with full-text search inside attachments, sortable and filterable tables, charts from tables, four-eyes approvals for document control under ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, simultaneous editing, versions with comparison, comments on the text, voice notes and meeting recordings with transcripts, image search with licence attribution and draw.io in our own house: that is the scope of ThurWiki, the company wiki from Switzerland.
Confluence users find spaces, page tree, macros, templates, personal space and watching in the usual place; MediaWiki and DokuWiki users get an editor that anybody in the office can operate.
See it on your own pages.
A demo wiki with a trial import of twenty of your pages. One afternoon.