Wiki

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Greg Taylor wrote:

>
>As much as I hate to open my mouth where it's not needed, I would have to say 
>that I agree that MediaWiki is definitely a nice system and arguably much 
>better suited for the role of heavily trafficked Wiki. The reasons that I 
>personally think this:
>
>- MediaWiki produces much more attractive, organized documents. An example of 
>this is the indexes that are automatically created near the top of pages from 
>headers and subnested headers. I can easily make a huge Wiki page and still 
>allow for easy navigation within it.
>  
>
In MediaWiki it's on by default. In Moin you add [[TableOfContents]] to
the location where you want it.

>- I'm really bothered that I can't edit just a portion of a page (a certain 
>section/header) and risk submitting conflicting changes on active pages. It's 
>not hard when you have someone sitting in an IRC room because you can ask 
>them if they're editing the page and see when they're done, but when some 
>random guy is updating things like mad on a certain page you're trying to 
>work on, ugh.
>  
>
Moin locks pages to other's editing when you start to edit a page. 
Section-by-section editing would probably be a good added feature though.

>- I've found MediaWiki to be a lot easier to manage. I can quickly manipulate 
>categories, move pages, modify templates, namespaces, and other things. 
>Rollbacks and revision history is easy to work with and I everything is in an 
>easy to reach location.
>  
>
But the raw data is more difficult to manage and migrate as it is all in
a central database. The Moin data is in individual text files in
directories, so if you have server access it's trivial to manage.

>- On the topic of code, MediaWikis power some massive, well-traveled sites and 
>the codebase is mature and tested. The code is somewhat harder to read than 
>Moin's due to language differences, but I honestly have had little need to 
>modify much in the Wikis I've worked with.
>  
>
It's true that many of the top-100 (by page size) wikis in the world are
on MediaWiki, but this is mainly local language versions of wikipedia,
which are obviously MediaWiki.

>- I may be wrong here, but I haven't been able to find a 'Discussion' 
>functionality for wiki pages. 
>  
>
This is planned, but not fully implemented. We will add a 'Talk' button
to the interface that let's you access the discussion page easily.

>I can appreciate that Ubuntu is all about using a common language for 
>developmental tasks, but consider the fact that the users don't care what's 
>powering something as long as it works :) 
>
And it does :)

>The thing I've found about 
>MediaWiki is that once it's running and setup, it just runs. 
>
As is the case with Moin :)

>It needs minimal 
>babying, you don't have to really do any actual maintenance other than 
>watching pages, and the content is often attractive even with the most borish 
>of pages. While it is nice that the current Wiki integrates into the theme of 
>the rest of the Ubuntu pages, again, I don't think the users care so much 
>about looks, content is the clincher. 
>  
>
And we have lot's of content, no? Remember our wiki is only about 10
months old, and not of general interest like Wikipedia. We have 3-4
times as many pages as the Fedora wiki.

>Moin does have its perks such as the fact that it looks to run really freaking 
>fast, which MediaWiki doesn't do without caching and other goodies. It is 
>also less cluttered in some areas, which can make things easier on the users.
>  
>
There are Moin features that we have not yet started to use like access
controls (that Matt mentioned in another email). We are planning to add
more useful features in time as well. Perhaps the most interesting thing
we're working on now is a filtered recent changes page, where you can
see which pages have changed in your chosen category, so doc team
members can look for changes in the doc pages, devels can look at devel
related stuff, etc.

>So in summation, I think the new wiki is a hundred times better than the old 
>one, but it's still young and somewhat immature as far as features go. I'd 
>like to see talk pages and some MediaWiki style section/indexes.
>
I'm glad you take a balanced view :) Well founded feature requests will
always be considered. Now that we are on a flexible platform that
actually works we can expand it various ways later.

I'd like to post a challenge to all the MediaWiki fans out there: Go to
the MoinMoin Feature pages and read a bit about what is available (much
of which we don't use). If you see something that might be a useful
extra feature let us know and we'll look at including it. Or if there is
one that is similar to something you want let us know and we'll look at
expanding it. Finally, if you have a great wiki feature in mind that
Moin doesn't offer at all, add it to the Moin feature requests.

http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinFeatures
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MacroMarket
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ProcessorMarket
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ParserMarket
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FeatureRequests

- Henrik