PmWiki-Talk

1. It is somewhat popular, but declining. It was more popular in the past when wikis were new, wiki markup was easier to type than HTML, and browsers could not consistently edit rich text directly. People who installed wikis at the time may still run them but sometimes they move on. I know of universities, hospitals, and companies using PmWiki as a local/corporate knowledge base.
2. Unknown, we do not track installations, do not have tracking pixels, and the default skins do not even link back to here.
3. In January 2026, 1297 unique IP addresses downloaded a PmWiki release archive (tgz or zip) 4086 times.
   • Some of the IP addresses may be different people behind regional gateways or proxies.
   • The release archives are also distributed by external websites, catalogs, we don't count these.
   • Some hosting providers provide one-click installs, they typically get the release here and their clients update directly from them.
   • We don't have stats for people updating via Subversion.
4. The page containing the oldest timestamp in the history is RHCE.RH300Day1, from 2002-12-16. Note that the 'ctime' page attribute was added in 2.1.beta15 (2005-12-28), pages created earlier don't have the creation timestamp. In addition, until about 2017, $DiffKeepDays caused page history older than 180 days to be dropped when a page was saved. There are many older edits that have been dropped and lost.
5. Yes. The Mailing lists activity has declined 20-30 times, from a few messages a day in 2009 to a few messages a month in 2025. I never knew the numbers of list subscribers, but I suspect many have unsubscribed.
   • OTOH core development has increased since 2021 when I got a relatively stable part-time job with PmWiki, as the PHP language keeps introducing breaking changes, and I have been incorporating helper functions and addons that I use on different projects.
6. I doubt the number of wikis was ever 2M - possibly the total number of pages not wikis. In the past, search engines showed the approximate total number of results even if they only showed the first few pages.
   • I found this 2006 message from Pm where he says his web server had 2M hits/month with approx. 40%=0.8M pmwiki.org page hits, but many bots.
   • In January 2026, we had 0.46M pmwiki.org page requests like /wiki/Group/Name without action, with response code 20x (not blocked, not errors, not redirects). That's about 15K requests/day.

Petko February 01, 2026, at 11:26 AM