Hi!
I hope I am emailing this to the right group. My concern was about mediawiki and it's limitations, as well as it's outdated methods. As someone wo runs a wiki, I've gone through a lot of frustrations.
Very sad to hear that!
Mediawiki makes millions more than Wordpress does too
Hahahahaha, ha, hahahahahahahahaha, hahahahah, haha, hahahahahahahaha.
Ha.
Hahaha.
Let me recover, uh, hahahaha, oh, hah, thanks.
First of all, Wordpress is a platform for a commercial product, Wordpress.com, backed by a company, Auttomatic, which has way more funding (it closed 30M$ investment round two years ago) and nearly 40 employees. They have commercial offerings which are bringing quite some additional revenue they can feed into development. And of course, they have to compete with Google's Blogger, SixApart, Facebook, Twitter and others.
In the large picture, Wikipedia raises money to spread knowledge, and the fact that people are using mediawiki in 3rd party environments is a side effect.
, why can't the money be put into making a modern product instead of in pockets of the people who run it? I know Wordpress and Mediawiki serve two different purposes, but that's not the point. The point is, one is modern and user friendly (Wordpress), and the other (Mediawiki) is not. Other complaints:
MediaWiki is very modern product, just not on the visible side (though maybe usability initiative will change that). It has lots of fascinating modern things internally :) Though of course, by "in pockets of people who run it", you're definitely trolling here. :-(
-Default skins are boring
They were not back in 2005 =)
-Very limited in being able to make the wiki look nice like you could with a normal webpage.
Why would that be a priority for foundation developers?
-A major pain to update! Wordpress upgrades are so simple.
'svn up' -> done! ;-) Same for Wordpress... :)
-Better customization so people can get a wiki the way they want.
Feel free to develop it that way.
It should be more like the wikis on wikia,
Wikia is mediawiki with extensions. So it is modern, again?
except without me having to learn css and php to make those types of customizations.
Why should we be facilitating _your_ needs?
Give me some option, some places to put widgets. Not every wiki is going to be as formal as the ones on wikimedia sites.
You can put 'widgets' via extensions. If you need something more, feel free to develop that.
And don't the people at Wikimedia commons get tired of always having to make changes so it actually suits their site? If they had some of the options from the get go, i'm sure they'd appreciate it too.
Maybe.
-I don't want to go to my ftp to download my local settings file, add a few lines then reupload it. This is caveman-like behavior for the modern internet.
You can use WebDAV, SFTP, SCP, and your own staging environments. On the other side, LocalSettings is the most flexible configuration method, that allows to manage thousands of wikis in quite small form factor.
-Being able to manage extensions like wordpress does.
Feel free to develop it :)
In short, it's time to spend some money from those millions of dollars from donations to make this software more modern. Being stubborn in modernizing it will only make this software less relevant in the future if other wiki software companies are willing to do things the people at Wikimedia aren't.
The donations are for making the software more modern for Wikimedia sites. Funneling them to MediaWiki as an open-source software project is a byproduct. :-)
Domas