The following job vacancy popped up in my inbox about five minutes ago.
http://www.jobserve.com/IB283EBC2A38E592B.job
Why are these folks using confluence instead of MediaWiki?
Brian McNeil
P.S. good luck to anyone who knows confluence and applies.
well, confluence *does* offer wysiwyg, in contrary to mediawiki...
2008/2/26, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org:
The following job vacancy popped up in my inbox about five minutes ago.
http://www.jobserve.com/IB283EBC2A38E592B.job
Why are these folks using confluence instead of MediaWiki?
Brian McNeil
P.S. good luck to anyone who knows confluence and applies.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 26/02/2008, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
well, confluence *does* offer wysiwyg, in contrary to mediawiki...
Lack of good WYSIWYG in MediaWiki is a major problem for wider acceptance of the software. This is a well-understood problem, if an as yet unsolved one :-)
There are some WYSIWYG editors for MediaWiki, but they're not that great beyond the basics of wikitext. Anything fancy is fraught with difficulties.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor
Good WYSIWYG is mostly blocked on a good wikitext grammar. Steve Bennett is leading the effort to write one on wikitext-l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/
You can see work so far at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec/ANTLR
Once that's done, WYSIWYG editor writers won't have to try to reverse-engineer wikitext themselves.
- d.
We did extensive work on an EBNF Grammar, XML Schema, and XSLT transformations for wiki markup, see:
http://www.riehle.org/category/wiki-tech/
We are based on Wiki Creole, which is sufficient for our research purposes. Going all the way to MediaWiki syntax is much harder...
(Wiki Creole by and large is a subset of MediaWiki markup.)
I'd be happy to share more of our experiences and contribute though.
Dirk
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 8:41 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 26/02/2008, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
well, confluence *does* offer wysiwyg, in contrary to mediawiki...
Lack of good WYSIWYG in MediaWiki is a major problem for wider acceptance of the software. This is a well-understood problem, if an as yet unsolved one :-)
There are some WYSIWYG editors for MediaWiki, but they're not that great beyond the basics of wikitext. Anything fancy is fraught with difficulties.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editorGood WYSIWYG is mostly blocked on a good wikitext grammar. Steve Bennett is leading the effort to write one on wikitext-l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/You can see work so far at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec/ANTLROnce that's done, WYSIWYG editor writers won't have to try to reverse-engineer wikitext themselves.
- d.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 26/02/2008, Dirk Riehle dirk@riehle.org wrote:
We did extensive work on an EBNF Grammar, XML Schema, and XSLT transformations for wiki markup, see: http://www.riehle.org/category/wiki-tech/ We are based on Wiki Creole, which is sufficient for our research purposes. Going all the way to MediaWiki syntax is much harder... (Wiki Creole by and large is a subset of MediaWiki markup.)
MediaWiki markup is difficult because a lot of it is the HTML produced by a series of regular expressions. This doesn't lend itself to making a grammar from.
If WikiCreole started out with a grammar, then a real WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor would be quite feasible, not just a WYSIAYG (What You See Is All You Get) one ;-)
I'd be happy to share more of our experiences and contribute though.
You should be quite interested in the wikitext-l archives and ANTLR pages on mediawiki.org, then :-)
(This is getting way off-topic for foundation-l ...)
- d.
Confluence is "enterprise ready" i.e. has a lot of features that MediaWiki doesn't have and that the public Internet community typically doesn't care about.
Confluence is based on an open source wiki engine, www.snipsnap.org, which unfortunately is stalling. (But is still one of the best engines out there IMO.)
Cheers, Dirk
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 8:41 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 26/02/2008, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
well, confluence *does* offer wysiwyg, in contrary to mediawiki...
Lack of good WYSIWYG in MediaWiki is a major problem for wider acceptance of the software. This is a well-understood problem, if an as yet unsolved one :-)
There are some WYSIWYG editors for MediaWiki, but they're not that great beyond the basics of wikitext. Anything fancy is fraught with difficulties.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editorGood WYSIWYG is mostly blocked on a good wikitext grammar. Steve Bennett is leading the effort to write one on wikitext-l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/You can see work so far at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec/ANTLROnce that's done, WYSIWYG editor writers won't have to try to reverse-engineer wikitext themselves.
- d.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 26/02/2008, Dirk Riehle dirk@riehle.org wrote:
Confluence is "enterprise ready" i.e. has a lot of features that MediaWiki doesn't have and that the public Internet community typically doesn't care about.
Or the users, in my experience - people don't actually seem to like using it much, though it is of course vastly superior to no wiki at all. "A wiki designed to be sold to people who get someone to print their email for them."
- d.
Dirk Riehle wrote:
Confluence is "enterprise ready" i.e. has a lot of features that MediaWiki doesn't have and that the public Internet community typically doesn't care about.
Confluence is based on an open source wiki engine, www.snipsnap.org, which unfortunately is stalling. (But is still one of the best engines out there IMO.)
Cheers, Dirk
"Enterprise ready" is just a marketing term. It doesn't actually say anything about what features it has and what features it doesn't have, and lots of enterprises are using MediaWiki out of the box.
Which brings me to one big thing that Confluence has but MediaWiki doesn't: a marketing team. Add to that a sales team and professional support services, and you have a convincing case for any corporate executive.
MediaWiki really needs very little development work done in order to take over the corporate world. But there is no support organisation to pay for it, so it doesn't get done. With commercial support funding development, MediaWiki could easily become the MySQL of wiki engines.
-- Tim Starling
Exactly. I've been managing our multiple-wiki install at my employer for almost a year now. Several departments are using them as an "internal whiteboard" if you will. I actually was looking at a job recently that would've titled me as a "Wiki Technology Consultant." I think this definitely shows that wikis have a place in the corporate world and the "Enterprise-ready" MediaWiki is just waiting on a company to basically market the product, as Tim said.
-Chad
On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:38 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dirk Riehle wrote:
Confluence is "enterprise ready" i.e. has a lot of features that MediaWiki doesn't have and that the public Internet community typically doesn't care about.
Confluence is based on an open source wiki engine, www.snipsnap.org, which unfortunately is stalling. (But is still one of the best engines out there IMO.)
Cheers, Dirk
"Enterprise ready" is just a marketing term. It doesn't actually say anything about what features it has and what features it doesn't have, and lots of enterprises are using MediaWiki out of the box.
Which brings me to one big thing that Confluence has but MediaWiki doesn't: a marketing team. Add to that a sales team and professional support services, and you have a convincing case for any corporate executive.
MediaWiki really needs very little development work done in order to take over the corporate world. But there is no support organisation to pay for it, so it doesn't get done. With commercial support funding development, MediaWiki could easily become the MySQL of wiki engines.
-- Tim Starling
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I have no doubts that MediaWiki could be evolved rather quickly into a wiki engine that plays well in the enterprise, i.e. appeals to the corporate buyer. (There are a few features, like multi-instance capabilities, that haven't been done well yet. I'm still waiting for Wikia to release its code on this... hint hint.)
The biggest problem is that the GPL + the situation that main developers can't be hired into a startup pretty much prevents the by now "traditional" commercial open source model. So you can't be a MySQL because you can't gain the rights to the software and play the MySQL game. At the same time, because of the GPL, you can't be EnterpriseDB (a commercialization of PostgreSQL).
Finally, there was a rather devastating report recently that showed that there is much less support services revenue earned in open source than you might think, hence making money by providing 24h support for a GPLed project isn't lucrative either.
Too bad, if you ask me...
Dirk
Tim Starling wrote:
Dirk Riehle wrote:
Confluence is "enterprise ready" i.e. has a lot of features that MediaWiki doesn't have and that the public Internet community typically doesn't care about.
Confluence is based on an open source wiki engine, www.snipsnap.org, which unfortunately is stalling. (But is still one of the best engines out there IMO.)
Cheers, Dirk
"Enterprise ready" is just a marketing term. It doesn't actually say anything about what features it has and what features it doesn't have, and lots of enterprises are using MediaWiki out of the box.
Which brings me to one big thing that Confluence has but MediaWiki doesn't: a marketing team. Add to that a sales team and professional support services, and you have a convincing case for any corporate executive.
MediaWiki really needs very little development work done in order to take over the corporate world. But there is no support organisation to pay for it, so it doesn't get done. With commercial support funding development, MediaWiki could easily become the MySQL of wiki engines.
-- Tim Starling
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 5:33 PM, Dirk Riehle dirk@riehle.org wrote:
I have no doubts that MediaWiki could be evolved rather quickly into a wiki engine that plays well in the enterprise, i.e. appeals to the corporate buyer. (There are a few features, like multi-instance capabilities, that haven't been done well yet. I'm still waiting for Wikia to release its code on this... hint hint.)
It's not by Wikia, but http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Farmer is an extension which can be used to run multiple instances.
Personally, I've found symlinks are enough and special extensions aren't needed for this. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family#Ultimate_minimalist_solution.
Angela
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org