Wiki

[Greg Taylor]

On Sunday June 26 2005 6:24 am, you wrote:
> 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

Thanks, I will definitely try to lend a hand where possible. My time has been 
extremely tight of late so I haven't had a lot of time to do much writing, 
but I'll play around with some new ideas and get them posted.
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