On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:11 PM, adam hyde adam@flossmanuals.net wrote:
can i suggest something I know will be fruitless and i apologise knowingly in advance but i feel a little compelled to suggest it anyway...mediawiki might not be the right technology for wikibooks...i would think it might be a bit sane to actually address this issue, even just on the 'what if' level... i understand the institutional and legacy issues however it might be an interesting academic excercise to consider _not_ bending mediawiki to solve something when it is clearly not designed for book content...instead take the issue through a technical 'needs' process and look for technical solutions that suit these needs...
Not to be rude, but "Duh!" Of course MediaWiki isn't the right software for our purpose. It's not completely inappropriate, but there are some serious aspects that would need to be addressed in an ideal world. Our technical wishlist is so long that Santa Claus won't even read it all, and I've been a VERY good boy so far this year :).
Technical momentum dictates that we stay with MediaWiki, however. It would be a gargantuan exercise to translate our database into another format for another software platform, and translate the wikitext in all our pages to be suitable for a different rendering engine. Plus, all the documentation we would have to rewrite, etc. Fortunately for us, we're able to get incremental changes made through bug reporting, and the WMF has been demonstrably more supportive of our needs in recent months, so things have been changing for the better. I've long advocated that we create a picture of what an "ideal" Wikibooks would be for us, and start approaching it in baby steps. Things like the FlaggedRevs extension and the new PDF extension are strong steps in that direction. We have a few more requests in the queue regarding the hierarchical structure of books and the way MediaWiki can support that architecture better. After that, I really think automated attribution needs to be high up on our list of needs.
--Andrew Whitworth