* Ashar Voultoiz <hashar+wmf(a)free.fr> [Sat, 08 Jan 2011 23:08:23 +0100]:
On 01/01/11 16:06, David Gerard wrote:
> Because MediaWiki is very little work. And we like to be treated
like
heroes every
now and then.
MediaWiki is not a little work. Not everybody can set up a farm
with
it's own (not WMF's) shared repository "commons" (I am especially
speaking of pre-instant commons era, where you had to alter many global
settings). Not everybody can have a path-based farm, instead of
DNS-based one. Even memorizing these wg* globals is a large work. 99% of
users do not even know that one might add JS-scripts to MediaWiki
namespace.
There's been done everything at my primary work to undermine my
MediaWiki deployment efforts - that it "easily can be installed via the
linux package - so why he is installing that manually", "markup is
primitive", "inflexible", "PHP is inferior language, use
ASP.NET
instead" and so on.
This is my exact experience. And I have been a
"hero" for 4 years in
my
current company. Almost all department now have a
MediaWiki
installation and nobody complained about the lack of ACL or WYSIWTF :b
BTW, there's HaloACL nowadays, although I haven't deployed it yet.
Unfortunately my own experience with earning on MediaWiki is not so
bright - perhaps because this is a third world country.
The main issues users encountered were :
- installing the parserfunction
- getting the wikipedia look'n feel (just add some CSS)
- single sign on (install Ryan Lane LDAP authentication)
Yes, that is simple. However not everything is simple and sometimes you
have to write your own extension. For example, there was no flexible
poll extensions some years ago.
Dmitriy