(Added MW-Enterprise mailing list)
On 02/06/2013 10:00 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
For corporate adoption, the main thing MediaWiki needs is not some particular feature. It needs to be supported. It needs an organisation with people who will care if corporate users are screwed over by a change. It needs community management, so that the features needed by corporate users will be discoverable and well-maintained, rather than developed privately, over and over. And it needs the smallest nudge of promotion, on top of what Wikipedia fans are doing for it. Say, a nice-looking website aimed at this user base.
Totally agreed.
I (along with a few other hardy volunteers) have been helping MW users at [[mw:Project:Support desk]] and it seems clear that the focus most developers have on the WMF use case has really made MW less usable for other people.
One of my clients had an older (1.11) MediaWiki installation that they are using to share information with their distributors world-wide. Their first attempt to get the system to do what they wanted was a flop since the Java developer they had working on the system really didn't know that much about MW. I was able to get the system upgraded to 1.19 and adapt MW to their infrastructure using hooks, ResourceLoader, and pages they could update in the "MediaWiki" namespace.
So, yes, I think MediaWiki has a lot to offer corporate users, but we haven't really made that clear or shown them how to do a lot of things they want to do.
Tim has it right when he says MediaWiki "needs community management, so that the features needed by corporate users will be discoverable and well-maintained, rather than developed privately, over and over."
We've discussed this sort of thing over and over, but I think we're actually beginning to make some headway now thanks especially to work by Mariya Miteva.