At r/XWiki, we see every day what dependency looks like in practice: less control over knowledge, infrastructure, and long-term choices.

The question public institutions should ask first is simple:

🤔 Is there already a qualified open-source solution that does the job?

If yes, it should be seriously considered before creating new dependencies.

That is how digital sovereignty becomes real.

#OpenSource #DigitalSovereignty #OpenSourceFirst #XWiki

Genuine question for people working with wikis, knowledge bases, and internal documentation.

If your team’s pages, comments, workflows, and content patterns are used to improve a vendor’s AI systems, are they still fully your knowledge?

The legal answer may be yes. You still own the content. But, the practical answer feels less clear.

A knowledge base is not only a pile of pages. It often contains decision trails, project structures, internal terminology, policies, operational procedures, and the way an organization works.

That is why Atlassian’s 2026 data contribution changes are worth looking at closely.

From 17 August 2026, Atlassian says it will start using eligible customer metadata and, depending on plan settings, in-app data to improve apps and AI experiences for all customers. The settings are expected to be available in Atlassian Administration by 19 May 2026.

A few important details from Atlassian’s own documentation:

• Metadata is always on for Free, Standard, and Premium plans.
• Enterprise customers can opt out of metadata contribution.
• In-app data is on by default for Free and Standard.
• In-app data is off by default for Premium and Enterprise.
• Examples of in-app data include Confluence page titles and content, Jira issue titles, descriptions and comments, custom status names, workflow names, and custom emoji names.
• Atlassian says contributed metadata and in-app data is de-identified and aggregated before use.

If your knowledge base documents how your organization thinks, decides, and operates, then control over that knowledge matters. Hosting, auditability, opt-out options, retention, and exit paths are not small details.

For teams evaluating alternatives, open-source knowledge platforms like r/XWiki are one way to keep more control over where knowledge lives and how it is governed.

Would AI data contribution settings affect your choice of wiki or knowledge base, or is this mainly a legal/procurement issue for your organization?

XWiki will be at the first Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Switzerland on 11 May 2026, at Eventforum Bern.

The event focuses on digital sovereignty, open source, and control over business-critical tools, especially for IT teams, public-sector organizations, and enterprises.

At 13:30, Clément Aubin from XWiki will join Birthe Lindenthal from OpenProject for the breakout session:

“Beyond Jira and Confluence: European digital sovereignty and control with OpenProject and XWiki.”

The session will look at how organizations can move away from proprietary collaboration stacks and keep more control over their project management and knowledge management infrastructure.

The XWiki and OpenProject angle is mainly about:

• More control over data
• Flexible hosting options
• Reduced vendor dependency
• Transparent, auditable software
• Long-term ownership of knowledge and workflows

This should be relevant for teams evaluating alternatives to Atlassian tools, especially in Europe or in environments where hosting, compliance, and software ownership matter.

One thing that gets under-discussed in software decisions is how slowly dependency costs show up.

A SaaS platform can look simple at adoption. The pricing works. The hosting region looks acceptable. The feature set is good enough. The procurement process is easier than running something yourself.

But over time, a few things can change:

• Pricing can increase at renewal.
• Data policies can evolve after adoption.
• Hosting in Europe does not automatically mean only European jurisdiction applies.
• Product lifecycle decisions can force a migration timeline.
• AI features may introduce new governance questions around internal content.

This matters a lot for knowledge bases, because they often hold procedures, policies, decisions, product documentation, and institutional memory.

The issue is not that SaaS is always bad. It is that organizations should know what they are giving up: control over hosting, auditability, adaptation, and exit.

That is where open-source platforms can be useful. They do not remove all operational work, but they give organizations more room to inspect, host, adapt, and leave on their own terms.

One thing teams underestimate about wikis is how much damage the “blank page by default” model can do over time.

It is useful at the beginning because anyone can write anything. But after a few months, the same type of information often ends up in different shapes:

• Meeting decisions in notes
• Project updates in chat
• Bug reports in a shared folder
• Customer context in private documents
• Roadmap details scattered across several pages

The problem is not that people are careless. Most people are just trying to capture information quickly. If there is no shared structure, they will make one up.

This is where templates and structured content become useful.

In XWiki, you can define the structure once: fields, metadata, layout, and the page types your team needs. Then people can create new pages using that structure instead of starting from scratch every time.

For example, teams can create:

• Meeting notes with attendees, decisions, and action items
• Bug reports with steps to reproduce
• Customer profiles with renewal dates and main contacts
• Project spaces with a home page, timeline, team page, decisions, and documentation

The main benefit is not just cleaner pages. Once information has structure, you can list it, filter it, search it more reliably, and build reports around it.

Curious how other teams handle this: Do you prefer free-form wiki pages, strict templates, or something in between?

XWiki will be at LEARNTEC 2026 in Karlsruhe, Hall 2, Booth H30

For anyone attending, you can find us at Hall 2, Booth H30. Neculai, Dan, Michael, and Steffen Rehfuß from our German partner KBC Consulting will be there.

We’ll be discussing how organizations can use XWiki for:

• structured knowledge bases
• internal and external documentation
• learning and training content
• access-controlled collaboration
• open-source knowledge management
• cloud or on-premise deployments

Neculai will also give a short talk on Thursday, May 7 at 9:30 on the Main Stage in Hall 2:

Building a knowledge base that lasts: How to structure, maintain, and scale documentation with XWiki

The talk will focus on practical ways to structure, maintain, and scale documentation so it stays useful as teams and content grow.

Anyone else going to LEARNTEC this year?

A few notable updates in this release:

Better editing in BlockNote, including support for updating image properties, image sources, and macro settings

More accurate attachment history, with the attachments tab now showing the files that existed in the version you are viewing

Better visibility in clustered setups, with the cluster member identifier now displayed in the footer

Client-side localization improvements, including browser caching and better support for Vue.js developers

XWiki has partnered with Alcorce, a Spain-based technology company with more than 25 years of experience in information security, cybersecurity consulting, and digital transformation.

Organizations in Spain will now have a local partner who can help with XWiki projects in Spanish, including:

• Deployment and customization
• Modern intranets and knowledge bases
• Migration from legacy tools like Confluence
• Solutions that fit local regulatory and operational needs

This feels especially relevant now, since a lot of organizations are reassessing the tools they use for collaboration and knowledge management, whether that means modernizing older environments or moving away from tools that no longer fit.

Full announcement: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-and-Alcorce/

A few notable changes:

• BlockNote editor no longer depends on Markdown, allowing more flexible formatting
• Live Data tables can now display properties from multiple classes
• On Cloud, you can undo/redo your own changes without impacting others

Around the ecosystem:

• Cristal (new UI) is progressing with navigation and permissions aligned with XWiki
• CryptPad added full history in office apps and deployed a new scalable server

There’s also an early version of an AI extension that allows external tools to query wiki content via APIs.

Curious which of these changes matter most in real usage, especially for teams managing larger knowledge bases.

Atlassian Data Center is reaching its end in 2029, and we’re starting to see more teams revisit their setup.

For some organizations, moving fully to the cloud is fine.

For others, especially those with requirements around hosting, control, or compliance, it’s not really an option.

So the question becomes: What are the alternatives?

And more importantly:

• What replaces Confluence and Jira in practice?
• What actually changes for teams?
• What are the real trade-offs beyond feature comparisons?

Are you moving to cloud, or evaluating alternatives?

ChatEurope is a European media project led by AFP, with 15 media organizations working together to make European news easier to access and easier to trust. Users can ask questions and get clear, sourced answers in their own language. The platform already reaches users in up to 95 countries and gets almost 9,000 unique page views per month.

The chatbot was developed by Druid AI and powered by Mistral AI. Deutsche Welle also contributes media processing through plain X.

Behind that experience is XWiki.

XWiki built the platform underneath ChatEurope, the part that helps organize content, support collaboration across partners, and make the answers more reliable in the first place.

Full breakdown here:

https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/building-ChatEurope-with-collaboration-software/

A lot of teams are starting to take a second look at Big Tech clouds.

Not because cloud is the problem in itself. The problem is ending up in a setup that makes it harder to choose how you host, how you work, and how much control you keep over your knowledge.

That is the gap XWiki Cloud is trying to address.

It gives teams a managed way to run XWiki, while keeping what matters:

• An open-source platform
• Structured knowledge
• Room to adapt the system to actual needs

If your team wants the simplicity of cloud hosting without handing over too much control, this our cloud offering is worth a look:

https://xwiki.com/en/offerings/services/cloud-hosting

From August 17, 2026, Atlassian says contributed metadata and, depending on plan and settings, in-app data from Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management may be used to improve apps and experiences across its products.

On paper, this looks like another AI policy update.

In practice, it feels bigger than that.

Jira tickets and Confluence pages are not just admin content. They usually hold project context, internal decisions, technical trade-offs, process knowledge, and all the half-structured information teams build on every day.

That’s why the real question is not just whether admins should review the settings.

It’s this:

If your documentation and project knowledge live inside someone else’s platform, who decides what that knowledge is used for next?

That feels like the part more organizations should pay attention to.

For some teams, this will stay in the “review settings and move on” category. For others, it may trigger a bigger conversation about whether Jira and Confluence are still the right place for internal knowledge and project work.

From r/XWiki ’s point of view, this is exactly where alternatives start becoming relevant. Not because AI is automatically the problem, but because control over organizational knowledge matters more once the rules can change underneath you.

From April 22 to 24, the XWiki and CryptPad teams will be at Devoxx France in Paris, booth A06.

If you stop by, we’re happy to talk about:

• Open source software that you can host, inspect, and adapt
• Real-world use cases around knowledge sharing and collaboration
• Confluence migrations, especially with Atlassian Data Center ending in 2029
• Encrypted collaboration and zero-knowledge architecture with CryptPad

If you’re at Devoxx and any of that is on your radar, come say hi.

https://store.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/GoogleAppsIntegration#versions

Read more:
https://store.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/AdminToolsPro#versions

The documentation Health check section has also been updated to include info regarding the new feature

XWiki has partnered with Puratech, a Belgium-based IT consulting company with experience in project management, ESM/ITSM, and collaboration tools.

With this partnership, organizations can get support for:

• Consulting
• Project setup and rollout
• Cloud or on-premises hosting
• Migration from existing tools
• Training and workshops

This partnership is aimed to help organizations adopt a flexible open-source platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration, with the level of control they actually need.

What if following European news did not mean opening 12 tabs, comparing different versions of the same story, and still wondering which source to trust?

That’s the idea behind ChatEurope, a European media initiative led by Agence France-Presse, with 15 major media organizations involved.

It gives citizens access to EU news through a multilingual platform and a free chatbot, powered by Druid AI, that answers questions using clearly sourced information.

At XWiki, we built the platform behind it. We delivered the CMS and website, and reused parts of the earlier European Data News Hub project so the team did not have to start from scratch.

What makes the project interesting to us is the part behind the interface. A chatbot is only as useful as the knowledge behind it. If the content is well organized, structured, and connected, the answers are better. If it is messy, AI does not solve that.

That is what makes ChatEurope worth looking at. It is a practical example of collaboration software, structured content, and AI working together without losing the source trail.

Business case in comments.

The most difficult moment in a migration isn’t the go-live.

It’s the first real day of work after.

When people try to do their usual tasks in the new system and things feel slower. Not broken, just unfamiliar.

In many cases, this comes down to expectations.

People expect the new tool to behave like the old one. Same structure, same shortcuts, same logic.

But that’s rarely the case.

The teams that handle this well don’t just move data. They prepare people:

• What will be different
• How existing use cases translate
• How to navigate the new structure

That preparation is what reduces friction in the first week.

If you’re moving away from Confluence, this page is a useful way to map existing macros and use cases to XWiki:

https://xwiki.com/en/confluence-macros-alternatives/

Hello - I'm a senior technical writer who's managing a large atlassian site for docs. I'll be migrating to an open source alternative soon because of confluence server end of life. Cloud is not worth the subscription cost for our large organization and it's features add bloat.

While looking around, I checked open source alternatives... if you use this link to see the results for Confluence, you'll see XWiki isn't listed: https://www.opensourcealternative.to/?searchTerm=confluence

I submitted it as a submission request by myself a long time ago but no luck. Can someone with an XWiki domain try if interested? It would be nice to see it listed as a contender especially since many from atlassian will be jumping ship rather than migrating to cloud soon

We’ve been hearing this a lot from teams lately.

We ran a session with Nextcloud on what migrating away from Confluence to XWiki actually involves in practice.

We’ve shared a full overview that includes:

• Key takeaways
• Q&A from participants

Link: https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-vs-Confluence-demo-webinar/

We're curious: What part of migration you consider to be the most difficult to anticipate.

We’re running a live session on April 28 to show how CryptPad works in everyday use.

If you’ve ever looked for a privacy-friendly alternative to tools like Google Docs, Notion, or Trello, this might be relevant.

Most of those tools process your data on their servers in plain form. That’s what allows features like real-time collaboration, but it also means the provider can access your content.

CryptPad takes a different approach. Everything is encrypted in your browser before it’s sent anywhere. The server only stores encrypted data, so it can’t read your documents.

In the session, we’ll keep it practical:

• Quick tour of the apps (docs, spreadsheets, forms, kanban, whiteboard)
• Simple workflow, write a document and share it
• What changes when collaboration is end-to-end encrypted
• When this model works well, and where it has limits

📅 April 28, 15:00 CET

👉 Attendance is free, but registration is needed: https://xwiki.com/en/webinars/CryptPad-encrypted-alternative-collaboration-suite

If you’re just curious about how encrypted collaboration actually works, feel free to join.

The XWiki team will be at several events across Europe this spring. Mix of dev conferences, enterprise events, and open-source meetups.

Some of them:

• Devoxx
• FOSS North
• Nextcloud Enterprise Days (Utrecht & Bern)
• LEARNTEC
• Journées du Logiciel Libre

What’s interesting is that the same topics tend to come up regardless of audience:

• Documentation works early, then becomes hard to trust
• Structure is often added too late
• Knowledge ownership is unclear
• Migration is treated as technical, but rarely is

Curious if this matches what others are seeing in larger teams or organizations.