I second that, just because Wikipedia is open to all editors does mean our
installations have to be.
*Mlpearc*
Founder
Everything Food &
<http://www.everythingfoodanddrink.org/w/index.php/Main_Page>
On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 3:30 PM, Boris Steipe <boris.steipe(a)utoronto.ca>
wrote:
Chris has made some excellent points and I agree
emphatically with all but
one:
IMO for the advanced user not all is good.
Maintaining and customizing a Wiki is a pain and always has been. Some of
the pains have been listed by Chris, but consider: to be effective you need
to have at least a working knowledge of
- wikiMarkup
- template syntax
- html
- css
- php
- javascript, and now
- lua
For those of us for whom administering Wikis is only a small part of our
mission, this makes no sense. Moreover it's an increasingly significant
barrier to introduce newcomers to the technology. For the last five years
or so I have had my students author Wiki pages to introduce them to the
benefits of a collaboration/documentation system. I am losing confidence
that this is still an effective, modern approach with a reasonable ROI of
their time.
And there is the old, old issue of access control. Whenever this comes up,
we only hear: MW is not a CMS. Then why not make it one if the users need
it? </rhetorical_question> Actually the question hasn't come up in a while,
now that I think of it. Actually not many questions about day to day Wiki
problems have come up recently at all anymore. This list has become pretty
silent.
Maybe not a good sign.
Kind regards,
Boris
On Jan 27, 2015, at 5:48 PM, chris tharp <tharpenator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
HI all,
As an entrepreneur who stumbled into a building a Mediawiki site here's
my
two cents.
Conceptually, I think, Mediawiki development should be guided by the
following principle: is it easy? And that principle should be applied by
reference to a hypothetical user at every level of interaction with
Mediawiki. The levels of interaction I see are:
1. Info seeker. To me that's hypothetical equal to someone searching
Google.
For the info seeker Mediawiki should be easier to search. Modern users
assume a "Google Like" experience, which the standard Mediawiki search
function does not delivery.
2. User. Someone who just adds data, text and media. Hypothetical equal
to
a Facebook User.
Modern users don't expect to write in arcane wiki syntax. A Visual editor
that allows editing by sections would be a needed first step (and
hopefully
one that could be used with Semantic Forms).
Media handling and placement is horrible for users. A user should have
the
experience that they're uploading into the
page they're editing.
Currently
only the Semantic Forms extension and the
Msupload extensions, to my
knowledge, give the experience of uploading to the page one is editing.
The
interface for uploading files in Semantic Forms,
however, is old. The
Msupload experience is far better for the normal user, but has no way to
set a license. After upload to the page one is editing the Visual editor
should allow a drag and drop placement of media on the page.
Outside Media, such as videos from YouTube, is currently handled by a
host
of extensions all of which require using some
form of wiki syntax, or
knowing which section of a url to use. A modern user expects the "magic"
of
dropping the url address in a field and having it
magically become a
YouTube video, Soundcloud audio file, etc. (this is most likely outside
of
standard Mediawiki issues).
Communication -- talk pages are very confusing to modern users. Flow
looks
like it's heading in the right direction, but
I would add the ability to
"easily" add media files. A photo or video many times is much clearer to
an
end user than text. A button to add a photo or a
video into the flow feed
would be a great improvement.
Access Control -- Users should "own" their user pages (which can be done
today via some extensions). Additionally users should control the
moderation of their own talk pages with the ability to "block" users.
(currently not possible with any Mediawiki extension that I know of)
3. Advanced User. Someone who creates templates, writes lua modules,
structured data (Semantic Mediawiki & Cargo), javascript (via Common.js &
NamespaceHTML extension), uses other scripting languages inside the wiki
(Phptags extension for example). No hypothetical equal except for
advanced
Wikipedia and Mediawiki admin.
For the advanced user all is good.
4. Website Management. Should be hypothetical equal to someone else
running
a Wordpress site.
As someone else said composer is for nerds. Extension management is
horrible inside Mediawiki. A GUI inside the wiki that checks the status
of
the extensions, uploads the extensions, uploads
other depend software,
and
uninstalls extensions would be a great step in
improving Mediawiki.
The Visual editor & Flow require node.js to be installed, which means the
mass majority of wikis will never have them.
Could your average Wordpress owner set up a Mediawiki with a good search
extension? For that matter could an average Wordpress owner set up the
Pdf
Handler extension?
How many Wikis are never updated, or have never had any maintenance
scripts
ran because it's too technical? How many use
the crappy search function
because it's too technical to install a good search extension?
Extension Management on
Mediawiki.org is less an ideal. The Extension
Matrix broke down a long time ago, but nothing has replaced it. To find a
new extension either one hears about it somehow, or one stumbles across
cross it in the sea of all extensions.
The world has gone Mobile, but Mediawiki really still hasn't. Mediawiki
must become more responsive in it's design.
As I said in the beginning it all comes down to: Is it easy? It's hard to
make things simple, but it is direction of the world. I would hate for
Mediawiki to become the software equivalent to MySpace.
On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Koerner, Chris L <
Chris.Koerner(a)mercy.net>
wrote:
> I’m a light Wikipedia (and related projects) editor, but help to
maintain
> and support two decent sized (hundreds of
contributors, thousands of
pages)
> internal wikis in the healthcare industry.
Our organization has been
using
> (Semantic) MediaWiki for over 6 years. I’ve
been maintaining it for
over 3.
>
> The first item we'd like to discuss with MediaWiki users is what should
> we actually focus on?
>
>
> Out of the box experience - As I was putting together this list I
thought
> about how many of the things I do when I
setup the wikis. The default
> installation does include some handy tools, but almost everyone I’ve
spoken
> to has their own brew of extensions they
setup by default (I have
upwards
> of 50).
>
> I would love to see improved first-run experience and documentation (on
> mw.org<http://mw.org>) on what is included by default, what the
> extensions do, where do I go to get more, etc.
>
>
> Editing - I think VisualEditor is the future of wiki editing. Wikitext
is
> powerful and at the moment savvy editors can
do more than VisualEditor,
but
> that gap is closing. I’ll meet with many
internal teams wanting to move
> away from email archives and Word docs for their documentation needs. I
go
> over the philosophy of MediaWiki, explain
it’s features (watchlists are
> magical!) and then I get to editing. Eww. People think it’s gross and
> backwards. People expect easy-to-use WYSIWYG editing - and they should
have
> it. I’ve spent more time explaining and
fixing wikitext errors than I’d
> care to admit.
>
> Just in the past few months the VisualEditor team has improved support
for
> things my co-workers care about - IE support
and tables. I think
Mediawiki
> should increase the push for use of
VisualEditor in third-party wikis.
I’ve
> been running it for a year now with great
success.
>
>
> More consistency in WMF extensions - There’s an inconsistency in
> documentation, UI/UX, and architecture requirements between WMF-backed
> projects.
>
> One extension might lack documentation, another has a specific technical
> requirement, another uses a unique UI paradigm, another an entirely
unique
> set of iconography (for similar actions!). I
expect this when dealing
with
> individual non-WMF extensions, but from the
same organization?
>
> An example: VisualEditor is great and I think it’s use will continue to
> grow. But holy cow is it a big requirement to have to install node.js on
> top of the LAMP stack. Another: MW core requires PHP 5.3.3, but Flow
> requires 5.3.6. PHP 5.3.3 is the default install for RedHat RHEL 6 - a
> common flavor found in many enterprise environments (like my own).
Getting
> PHP updated is not only a technical
challenge, but also an
administrative
> one inside large organizations. The server
team wants to stick with
what is
> supported via the vendor, I want to use the
latest innovative features.
> Conflict arises.
>
>
> More consistency in extensions in general - There’s an opportunity to
show
> a focused, collaborative, platform for the
experience within MediaWiki -
> and extensions from all sources. Where’s the MediaWiki Style Guide for
> buttons, dropdowns, menus, etc? Some use bootstrap, some use jquery,
some
> follow WMF’s designs. Developers from all
walks are making cool things,
but
> let’s make cool things like behave as part of
something bigger.
WordPress,
> while not perfect, is a great example of a
robust ecosystem of 1st-party
> and 3rd-party extensions attempting some semblance of integration.
>
>
> Updates - Composer is for nerds. I mean that in a positive way - I’m a
> self professed nerd (as shown by the length of this response). Composer,
> and the traditional installation/update methodology for extensions is
> cumbersome and yet another requirement. I want a one-click update button
> from a Special: page. It would alert met to available updates (from
> mediawiki.org<http://mediawiki.org> or git gerrit) and let me install
> them without touching a Terminal window. Yeah, I know that there’s a
lot of
> crazy interdependencies between MW versions
and extension version - and
> between extensions themselves. Maybe that’s telling? How do other
> open-source projects accomplish a much more unified install/updating
> experience?
>
>
> WMF Extensions (or any really!) prepackaged with necessary templates -
> UploadWizard is a great extension that makes the uploading of images
super
> easy and consistent. I love it. However, it
requires numerous template
> files and images to work, none of which is documented or included. I
don’t
> need to include every language and deep
documentation for all those
> templates. Just the basics.
>
>
>
> If you use MediaWiki for your own wiki, what sort of things do you think
> need more attention?
>
> Uhh, I may have gotten carried away with the first question. See above?
I
> think some of my thoughts touch on the
cultural aspects of MediaWiki.
We’re
> a diverse group without a lead on some of
these things. How do we get
big
> things done like improving extension
documentation? How do we make the
> experience more consistent when there are hundreds of cooks in the
kitchen?
> How can we encourage popular developers to
lead by example? We’re a very
> technical community - more so than say (again) WordPress. There’s a
large
> dev-focused community around that particular
software, but there’s also
a
> large group of people just using it! I think
communication should be a
> bigger area we focus on.
>
> How can we help you find out about things you need
> to know to run your wiki?
>
> Documentation on mw.org<http://mw.org>. Regional (or online) hangouts
-
> where I can see someone’s screen as they talk
about something. Social
Media
> - twitter in particular. I feel like it’s
hard to know about discussions
> (like the removal of site stats) as they’re happening. I’m into
MediaWiki
> developments, but not to the point where I
read every Request for
Comment
> (RfC). How do we bubble up that to more folks
using MediaWiki?
>
> --
>
> Shameless Plug: If you’d like to share the work that you’re doing with a
> group of 3rd-party wiki folk, you should attend SMWCon Spring 2015:
>
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Spring_2015 . I’m the Local
> Chair for the conference and would love to see you there. I’d be happy
to
> set aside some time on the third day to
continue discussions like this
one.
>
> Nerd in Residence,
> Chris Koerner
> This electronic mail and any attached documents are intended solely for
> the named addressee(s) and contain confidential information. If you are
not
> an addressee, or responsible for delivering
this email to an addressee,
you
> have received this email in error and are
notified that reading,
copying,
or
disclosing this email is prohibited. If you received this email in
error, immediately reply to the sender and delete the message completely
from your computer system.
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
To unsubscribe, go to:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
To unsubscribe, go to:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
_______________________________________________
MediaWiki-l mailing list
To unsubscribe, go to:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l