On 9/21/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov > wrote:
I find the wiki at http://www.mediawiki.org/ to be missing basic, essential information - not encyclopedic in scope. ...
For example, go to http://www.mediawiki.org/ and search for almost ANY
basic wiki word related to MediaWiki software, and you'll get a RED response, meaning there's no page for what you're lookin' for.
...
The list of missing entries, the lack of encyclopedic
support of MediaWiki software on MediaWiki.org is huge!
One of the enduring flaws of MediaWiki (the software, not the site) is that its search feature is surprisingly unintuitive. In the case of MediaWiki.org, things are made even worse by some of the information still being on Meta waiting to be transwikied. It's often easier to find what you want by Googling site:mediawiki.org Some Keyword (although bear in mind that very new pages won't be indexed yet).
Then, as with any wiki, go ahead and do it yourself. Go ahead and build
a page to support that missing word, even a "stub", or starter page, or disambiguation page, to get things going. It's a wiki, after all - edit every page!
And then watch.
Admins there will delete that page and tell you to keep your hands off the site.
OUCH!
Then try to dialog on the discussion / talk pages with them, and suggest that you have a need for help with the info you tried to record there. Suggest that there's a whole new wave of MediaWiki implementers out here that are not at all like the initial coders currently managing the site. Suggest that we all can get along, and each have different but non-competitive contributions to offer - "hey, let's build a MediaWiki support encyclopedia wiki" - ... and they'll ban you.
So, what then do we think the wikis surrounding the Foundation, especially MediaWiki.org, are for?
From a casual glance at the block log I can't find the particular incident
you're referring to, but the site certainly has a much smaller scope than Wikipedia.
MediaWiki.org has strict policies about namespace usage (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Namespaces), and there is virtually nothing in the article namespace; because the search function's "Go" button only auto-detects articles in the main namespace that information will often be covered in great detail in another page, so I guess newbies coming in and making "inferior" stubs about these topics gets very annoying. Without a huge amount of redirects or a major overhaul of the search engine there's only so much that can be done to avoid these unwanted pages.
Hence my chagrin and befuddlement trying very, very hard to be an
evangelist for MediaWiki out here in the real world, yet turning around and finding such hardened unwillingness from the Foundation's own wikis to permit us to participate in free and open encyclopedic wikis to support us all.
It seems to me that MediaWiki.org only houses three "books"; the Manual, the Help, and the Extensions; while the extensions are largely sorted by categories, the Manual and Help have straightforward structures of namespaces and navigation (not unlike works at Wikibooks) rather than mere interlinking as with Wikipedia. Any pages that fall outside these seem to be focussed on defining and improving the scope and content of these collections, so general encyclopedia-style information has no place there under the current policy.
One thing to consider is contributing to a "fan" wiki instead, and building the sort of information you want there. If the MediaWiki.org residents like how it turns out that information could perhaps be merged back in, or even just linked to from the appropriate pages. Certainly there are things people like to know that don't necessarily fall into the way these three volumes are currently presented.
http://www.mwusers.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page is a possible location; while it's relatively empty at the moment it has a wider scope than just the software. Perhaps someone could start a drive to get more information there. As an added bonus the site has its own forums for less structured discussion.
Garrett