I've been creating a job description for making a non-profit ad-free website which will allow people to setup their own communities where they can work on solving problems relating to specific areas. Different tools will be provided to them including a custom-built task management system, a forum and a wiki. The whole website will be "wiki" based i.e., people will collaboratively work together and edit task items which are not Wiki pages. For example it may be a row in a database of another table. Anyone can fill out a form and a new community is created along with a wiki of their own. So each community will have access to its own set of wiki pages. They may have 5 or 20 or 100 pages. In the long term there may be 100's or 1000's of communities if the website is a success. The URL of a wiki could be something like: en.Solveissues123.org/Community6543/Wiki http://en.Solveissues.org/Community6543/Wiki The issues are: (1) User database. I'd like to keep a common user database so people can login once and edit other community wikis. (2) Interlinking between various wiki communities (3) Sidebar content for each community so they have their own navigation. (4) Communities may be set up in their own language so a wiki may have its own language. (5) There may be customization for aesthetics.

It will be like Wikia but I have to reserve the sub-domains for languages. I want to use Mediawiki and it will have to be customized to a large extent. I have different options:

1. Use one Mediawiki for the whole website (so one database). Let people separate their community wikis by using different page titles for example [[Community6543/Title of Page]]. They would have to use a similar notation to keep their categories separate. There will be one user database so that's good since anyone can edit a page from any community. The issue are the sidebar and other navigational links and language options. I could get the installation fully customized and change it so they need to edit [[Community6543/Sidebar]] to show their own navigation.

2. Use one mediawiki for each community. They can all use the same user database ($wgSharedDB). Not sure how to manage interlinking here. Any other issues I need to think about? This may be a good solution since a community may have its own language.

3. Use a 3rd light weight wiki software that provides basic wiki functions (editing, page history, diffs). Is there anything like that available or would it need to be created from scratch?

A sidenote: Any general advice on how to manage the individual forum creation as well? I would not like to use the talk pages as forums but rather an independent traditional forum for each community.

Any advice would be appreciated. Or if you know where I can get professional help in creating the job description for this website let me know. I can then post the job at a freelancing website to have the website made.

Jay