On 8/8/06, Christiaan Briggs christiaan@yurkycross.co.uk wrote:
Looks like we'll finally be ditching MediaWiki in our office next year. Apple has come to the party with a WYSIWYG wiki of its own:
Congratulations!
MediaWiki is not targeted at internal office use. While some people do use it successfully in this market, we offer no support, have no marketing, make no income from it, and don't make any effort whatsoever to be more than tolerable for it.
I'm glad you've found other software which is more appropriate for your requirements.
We really are not trying to sell MediaWiki to you or to anyone. It *really is* good for us if you need something different and you *use* something different because of that. That's better both for you and for us.
The biggest obstacle, it has often seemed to me, is an installed base of Wikipedians who see wiki markup as a way of protecting their territory and minimising participation by others.
That's absolutely false. Rather, the reason that all attempts have failed so far is that we have an installed base of millions of *pages* of *content* over *five years* with which compatibility *must* be *retained* for *Wikimedia*. Hacky HTML editors damage the text and destroy pages during editing, which is completely contrary to our requirement to preserve page text across tens of thousands of edits.
We simply have no interest in your intranet. It's not on our radar. We have no deal to provide you with intranet software. It's not what we do.
Thanks to those who have been working on WYSIWYG for MediaWiki, particularly in trying to integrate FCKEditor. I wish your efforts had borne fruit earlier and it's a pity you haven't had more support, but I'm sure you'll get there eventually.
I advise you not to waste time waiting on these integration efforts. The back-and-forth conversion they require is likely to never work properly.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)