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(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Phone: +1 650 215 3459 Web: http://www.riehle.org

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(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Phone: +1 650 215 3459 Web: http://www.riehle.org

Dirk Riehle wrote: "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

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: -- Phone: + 1 (650) 215 3459 Web: http://www.riehle.org