Sj-
Yesterday, the O'Reilly Network's Scott Hacker
addressed the end-user
experience of setting up and customizing a wiki (with some eloquent
commentary by visitors at the end) :
_Where's the Movable Type of the Wiki World?_ (
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5794 )
Hacker suggests the Wiki world needs its own elegant,
soup-to-nuts
wikiproject, comparing the chaos of wiki communities and documentation
to that of the blogging world pre-Movable Type. He shopped around for
a wiki to use for an educational project (which was inspired by
WikiPedia, retro camel caps and all), and finally settled on MediaWiki
as the best choice. Unfortunately, its "scattered and obtuse"
documentation, "stupidly difficult" customizations, and lack of an
off-wiki user manual, left him cold. He notes he'd be willing to pay
on the order of $100 for an actively developed, well-supported
solution.
I'll use this as an opportunity to promote again the help effort on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
This is really something every user can help with. There are now several
services which offer free print-on-demand books in the style Cafepress
offers t-shirts (in fact, Cafepress is one of them). So it should not be
too hard to create a printed manual for MediaWiki.
I wonder whether we need something like [[en:Wikipedia:Collaboration of
the Week]] for the whole Wikimedia community, where the current WMCOTW
would be visibly promoted on all projects. This could help in jumpstarting
things like translation, transwiki, new project proposals, embassies, etc.
Regards,
Erik