Size Comparisons with Wikis

Sputnik is "simple" in the sense that the installation consists of three files that add up to 1140 lines, two general purpose libraries, and 300 lines of templates. Even if you add up all of those together, plus the examples, it's still less than 2000 lines of code. In comparison, Oddmuse and UseMod wikies (both considered small) weigh in at 4000 and 5000 lines respectively. This comparison may be unfair since Sputnik runs on top of Kepler, but Kepler is easy to install and is very small. Kepler consists of 85K lines of code (that includes Lua itself) that build into an 800kb directory, so even Sputnik + Kepler is substantially smaller and simpler than systems like MoinMoin (26MB/92K lines of Python + 1.2M lines of the Python implementation), not to mention MediaWiki (15MB/230K lines of PHP, on top of over 1.5M lines PHP implementation). Obviously, Sputnik doesn't do everything MediaWiki does, but you trade bells and whistles for simplicity. So, if you want a wiki that you can understand, this may be a good option. One of the design goals for Sputnik is to keep this basic setup small. In fact, we are hoping to get it to be under 1000 lines of Lua code.