Collaborative writing and documentation tool?

Now I’m back on the scene and have changed some of the priorities in my life (I always say that after every holiday, but maybe it’ll stick this time), I’m wheeling out old projects that I want to do…

First up is to set up an online collaborative documentation site about a large disused slate quarry in North Wales, that I visited again last week. It’s not a common choice to write about, but I find industrial archeology, and the industry to which it belonged fascinating. There are also other people out there who are more knowledgable than me who will be able to contribute as well.

The obvious choice of software is “MediaWiki”:http://www.mediawiki.org/. However… because we construct models of the quarry, and because the quarry is disused and decaying, there’s been a lot of photos taken to record it. As well as overall shots of the quarry there’s shots for each level within the quarry, then for each building on each level… and these photos need to be categorised and displayed in a gallery on the website, with captions and descriptions. This is something that MediaWiki doesn’t appear to support - it’s fine to insert images into pages of text, but not to browse the images.

Soooo, any other solutions I’ve missed? Collaborative writing is growing in popularity, and something must be right for documenting industrial archeology sites like this quarry.