Pros of a statically-generated site:
- Hosting is easier, as it only consists of static pages and assets
- Maintenance is simplified, no database to backup for example
- Documentation can be versioned along with the code it documents
- (GitHub) You get a review system built-in with Pull Requests
- (GitHub) You can tag the whole documentation and have branches per released versions
Pros of a wiki with XWiki:
- Easy for anyone to enter content, including for non-technical users. No HTML to know nor any specific DSL to understand. No need for an account on GitHub nor the need to understand how to make a PR.
- Much faster to enter content through the WYSIWYG editor or through wiki markup.
- Changes are immediately visible. You edit a page and click save or preview and you can see the result. No need to go through a build that will push the changes. With preview you can go back to editing the page if you're not satisfied and that's very fast. With WYSIWYG editor you don't even need to preview you get that built in.
- Richer search, see for example the XWiki.org Search UI vs the Groovy Search UI.
- Ability for users to comment the website pages.
- Ability for users to watch pages and be notified when there are changes to those pages
- Ability to see what's new in the documentation and the changes made
- Your pages are not saved along the code in a single SCM. However XWiki pages can be exported to an XML format and the exported pages can be saved in the same SCM as the code. There are even GitHub Extension and SVN Extensionto help you do that.
- Pages can be exported in different formats: OpenOffice, Word, PDF, etc.
- Ability to display large quantity of filterable data in tables with great scalability. For example display references of some sites using XWiki or the Page Index, or the Release Notes.
- Ability to have dynamic examples that can be tested directly in the wiki. For example the XWiki Rendering can be tested live.
Features you get on both:
- Versioning of changes
