On this note, MTV Networks (my previous job) switched from using Mediawiki to Confluence a couple years ago. They mainly cited ease of use and Microsoft Office integration as the reasons. Personally I hated it, except for the dashboard interface, which was pretty slick. Some Wikipedia power-users have similar dashboard style interfaces that they have custom built on their User Pages, but I think it would be cool if we let people add these sort of interfaces without having to be a template-hacker.
The sort of interface I'm talking about would include stuff like community and WikiProject notices and various real-time stats. If you were a vandal fighter, you would get a vandalism thermometer, streaming incident notices, a recent changes feed, etc. If you were a content reviewer, you would get lists of the latest Featured Article and Good Article candidates, as well as the latest images nominated for Featured Picture Status, and announcements from the Guild of Copyeditors. The possibilities are endless.
Ryan Kaldari
On 12/31/10 4:35 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Neil Kandalgaonkar"neilk@wikimedia.org
Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration has to happen, nobody in this group says "Let's make a wiki page!"
Why not?
That used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs.
Oh.
Well, that's bad. But people will choose the wrong tools; I don't think that's evidence that MediaWiki's Broken As Designed.
"Too powerful and complex to administer"?
It needs administration? In a small organization?
I set one up at my previous employers, and used it to take all my notes, which required exactly zero administration: I just slapped it on a box, and I was done.
And my successor is *very* happy about it. :-)
Cheers, -- jra
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