Geoffrey-
And MediaWiki intuitively sounds like software for
editable multimedia -
We allow embedding all kinds of files using image: and media: links. We
support LaTeX formulas, and SVG support is planned (which could quite
possibly allow collaborative editing of SVG files). We would be really
multimedia compliant if we added support for GNU Lilypond, as has been
suggested in the past, but there don't seem to be enough music buffs to
pull it off. Furthermore, it is one of my design goals to make image
embedding as simple as possible, but even now our image handling has
features which other wikis lack (such as reverting and restoring specific
revisions of an image).
Wikipedia itself has all types of media (except for videos, I think).
Aside from that, the term "media" can be interpreted in many ways -- I
interpret it more as a means of communicating ideas and concepts than a
specific *form* of media. In other words, MediaWiki is about turning wikis
into effective media. And there are yet more interpretations: MediaWiki is
"middleware" between the database and the wiki-application for which it is
used. MediaWiki is mediocre. MediaWiki can be used to calculate medians.
MediaWiki has been featured in many media reports. MediaWiki is better for
information storage than floppy disks. MediumWiki allows you to
communicate with dead spirits.
Why do we need to _rename_ Phase III?
Because Phase IV is still a while away, or may not happen at all (we may
stick to making incremental improvements to this codebase), and because we
need to advertise our software in a way that appeals to people beyond our
current image as an encyclopedia project. "Phase III" is a crappy
designation, so people just refer to it as "the Wikipedia software" (822
hits on Google) as opposed to "Wikipedia Phase III" (55 hits).
Right now, many people do not use the Wikipedia software because they
think it is too tailor made for an encyclopedia. That's true in some
respects (we do not make it easy enough to change all the Wikipedia-
specific strings), but we are becoming more general as our spinoff
projects prove, and I hate to see interesting projects use inferior
software like TWiki because it has better marketing.
Regards,
Erik