I'm in somewhat of a unique position to comment on this, since I both do MediaWiki extension development, and run a MediaWiki consulting company (shameless plug: wikiworks.com) - so I personally have a financial interest in making MediaWiki more popular and more easy-to-use. I also tend to hear a lot about the specific frustrations people have with MediaWiki, which has led to my development of certain extensions, like Admin Links, which defines a page meant to serve as a "control panel" for administrators:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Admin_Links
Troll-like as the original email was, :) it brought up some fairly common complaints. The basic answer to these is that they are, in fact, being addressed: as a few people noted, the usability initiative has already created a much nicer skin, Vector; and a planned project for the upcoming Google Summer of Code is to provide a way to install and manage extensions via the web browser, the way WordPress does it. A few extensions, like Configure, also allow for a web-based substitute for editing LocalSettings.php, though they could stand some improvement.
Finally, on the more general subject of Wikimedia's relationship to MediaWiki: I do think it would be nice if Wikimedia, and outside MediaWiki developers, were more aware of, and more positive about, MediaWiki's popularity in the outside world. It's used very heavily as an enterprise wiki around the world, and I think for good reason: it's robust, stable, very feature-rich, heavily translated, and when used with the set of extensions around Semantic MediaWiki I think it's in a class of its own. I just think a better answer when people ask about problems with MediaWiki is to say "I don't know", or "I think someone's working on that", rather than "MediaWiki is intended for use by Wikimedia projects, and if you have a problem using it, you should switch to another wiki application." First, for many uses there is no better wiki software, especially not for the cost; and second, there are a lot of people, especially among extension developers but also in general, who are trying to improve MediaWiki as a corporate/organizational application. I just think it would be nice if more people celebrated MediaWiki's popularity, instead of ignoring or trying to discourage it. :)
-Yaron
A lot of the replies were helpful, in particular Ryan Lane and Yaron's replies. Also made a quick reply to Domas.
First to Ryan:
This is likely the right list.
Are you aware of the Wikipedia usability initiative? Have you seen the new skin they are creating (Vector), or the awesome new features they are adding? If not, please see the usability wiki:
While vector is a step in the right direction, it's still pretty dry and plain. As a default skin it is perfectly fine, but i'd be nice to get some fancier skins out the box and be able to change the default skin for ALL users through the admin's preferences rather than editing a file.
The skin system is also likely to have a major update in a very future version of MediaWiki. Look through this list's archives, the discussion was fairly recent.
Great news!
-A major pain to update! Wordpress upgrades are so simple.
I don't really find updates to be terribly difficult. You mostly just check out (or download) the newest version, and run update.php. This is probably more difficult without shell access.
I have shell access, but it's not something I or a lot of people like doing. Most people don't want to do command lines except very technical people. Not everyone who runs a wiki is technical. Shouldn't the user of the software be kept in mind? I mean I know it's technically for wikimedia sites, but they can't pretend to be unaware that thousands of people are using it for their own personal wiki projects. I don't demand change, but isn't acknowledging your users a basic programing practice?
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.
Get a host that supports SSH. Use VI, Emacs, nano, pico, etc.
I do have SSH, again, it's not the way I want to do it. Old school style. On the modern internet, it'd be nice to have a more modern way to editing my local settings. But it's good to hear someone is developing this.
You are more than welcome to submit patches, and/or help develop the features you want. I maintain a number of extensions, and have worked with the MediaWiki code base for a number of years. I've found the Wikimedia foundation, and the core developers to be very welcoming of improvements to the software.
I wish I could! I have experience in java and c++, but not php except modifying a few basic changes of an already written php file. Also just jumping into a project without knowing the structure and how to write an extension is also no easy task and would take a long time. If time is money, i'd rather pay a developer to develop it, but chances are the features i would need would be useful to other folks and those features would be nice if it came in the package by default.
Thanks again for your reply, it was really helpful and insightful Ryan.
________________________________ From: Yaron Koren yaron57@gmail.com
Finally, on the more general subject of Wikimedia's relationship to MediaWiki: I do think it would be nice if Wikimedia, and outside MediaWiki developers, were more aware of, and more positive about, MediaWiki's popularity in the outside world. It's used very heavily as an enterprise wiki around the world, and I think for good reason: it's robust, stable, very feature-rich, heavily translated, and when used with the set of extensions around Semantic MediaWiki I think it's in a class of its own. I just think a better answer when people ask about problems with MediaWiki is to say "I don't know", or "I think someone's working on that", rather than "MediaWiki is intended for use by Wikimedia projects, and if you have a problem using it, you should switch to another wiki application." First, for many uses there is no better wiki software, especially not for the cost; and second, there are a lot of people, especially among extension developers but also in general, who are trying to improve MediaWiki as a corporate/organizational application. I just think it would be nice if more people celebrated MediaWiki's popularity, instead of ignoring or trying to discourage it. :)
-Yaron
I agree 100%, especially the part I bolded. Also god bless the developers and extension writers for doing this out of their own free time, I guess I misunderstood the process and thought wikimedia had a code team that was paid.
Also I saw on a news site: "The foundation has snared an $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation for the project and plans to assemble a five-person team to identify what exactly is turning some users off." $890,000 for only a 5 man team? It would be great if this money went into some of the common changes people need.
Full View _______________________________________________________________________
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 :)
Overall it's awesome no doubt (otherwise I wouldn't have used it in the first place), but a few of the practices (i.e. editing localsettings file through shell or ftp) and gui/aesthetics should definitely be more 'modern.'
-Default skins are boring
They were not back in 2005 =)
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since then.
-A major pain to update! Wordpress upgrades are so simple.
'svn up' -> done! ;-) Same for Wordpress... :)
The average person who wants to start a wik is gonna have no idea how to do that, much less even understand what svn up means. While I don't expect to be dumbed down a huge degree, a little bit more simplicity wouldn't hurt would it?
-Better customization so people can get a wiki the way they want.
Feel free to develop it that way.
Easier said than done.
It should be more like the wikis on wikia,
Wikia is mediawiki with extensions. So it is modern, again?
Wikia is heavily modified to give the gui a much more modern feel. Again i'm mostly focusing on the aesthetics. Unfortunately I don't think wikia distributes their skins.
except without me having to learn css and php to make those types of customizations.
Why should we be facilitating _your_ needs?
It's not just not my needs. It's about user friendliness for anyone who is using wikimedia to work on their wiki project. While the developers have no obligation to do it, it would be nice if they realized who their users are other than wikimedia.
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.
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.
-Being able to manage extensions like wordpress does.
Feel free to develop it :)
These types of replies are hilarious. It's like Iphone user: "Dear Apple, if your iphone had the following features it would be great (A) (B) (C) ... " Apple: "Oh if you want those features, go ahead and develop them on your own." If I knew how to I would have done it already. What kind of advice is that? Seriously lol
On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 9:42 PM, Chris Lewis yecheondigital@yahoo.com wrote:
-Being able to manage extensions like wordpress does.
Feel free to develop it :)
These types of replies are hilarious. It's like Iphone user: "Dear Apple, if your iphone had the following features it would be great (A) (B) (C) ... " Apple: "Oh if you want those features, go ahead and develop them on your own." If I knew how to I would have done it already. What kind of advice is that? Seriously lol
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
The difference being that MediaWiki is largely written by volunteers who each have their own reasons for contributing which may or may not align with what you'd like to do. If you have things you'd like to see done, you have to drive that change--either by contributing it yourself, or finding someone who's willing to work on it.
When you're proposing changes that require a substantial amount of work to implement, don't be surprised when you don't have people lining up to work on it.
-Chad
Hi!
A lot of the replies were helpful, in particular Ryan Lane and Yaron's replies. Also made a quick reply to Domas.
Replies are good!
Overall it's awesome no doubt (otherwise I wouldn't have used it in the first place), but a few of the practices (i.e. editing localsettings file through shell or ftp) and gui/aesthetics should definitely be more 'modern.'
Priorities, priorities. Do note, no GUI will be able to scale to configuration needs most easily explained by pointing at http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since then.
Damn, you just shattered my illusion that I'm still young!
The average person who wants to start a wik is gonna have no idea how to do that, much less even understand what svn up means. While I don't expect to be dumbed down a huge degree, a little bit more simplicity wouldn't hurt would it?
Average person who doesn't know how to do that can always try out service providers, and service providers can provide more skins and configuration interface, value added! Maybe we could have a shell script that does upgrade, but 'one click upgrade' from the web interface is quite insecure method.
Maybe a good enough method would be having a simple shell script that does all that..
Feel free to develop it that way.
Easier said than done.
Exactly ;-) It is huge engineering effort that may not be entirely aligned with WMF mission. I have done quite a few changes to MediaWiki ages ago to better support my small company wiki needs (e.g. no hassle single sign on) - and somehow those changes got in (probably because, ehem, we didn't have formalized code review back then :-)
Wikia is heavily modified to give the gui a much more modern feel. Again i'm mostly focusing on the aesthetics. Unfortunately I don't think wikia distributes their skins.
https://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/skins/
Personally I'd like to see more stuff from Wikia to be poached into Wikimedia deployment (we're giving too much time for Wikia to learn from their mistakes, before we learn from theirs :)
It's not just not my needs. It's about user friendliness for anyone who is using wikimedia to work on their wiki project. While the developers have no obligation to do it, it would be nice if they realized who their users are other than wikimedia.
Everyone realizes that there're users other than Wikimedia. It is one of reasons why mediawiki has plethora of features that are not needed on Wikimedia sites (and that introduces code complexity). It is also one of reasons why 'mediawiki' is 'mediawiki' and not 'wikimedia software'
Of course, Wikimedia use quite often stands in the way of development (as features have to be secure, scale nicely and maintainable in medium-large sized operations environments) - and unfortunately for feature development, fortunately for everyone who runs large mediawiki instances, those needs have to be in the core of project.
These types of replies are hilarious. It's like Iphone user: "Dear Apple, if your iphone had the following features it would be great (A) (B) (C) ... "
If you missed, iphone also has 3rd party application community. (a), (b), (c) features have been developed by third parties already, or there's a niche for those third parties. Of course iphone economy is much fancier than mediawiki economy, so probably niches aren't filled here as fast.
You know, Microsoft didn't write every application for Windows, Apple doesn't own everything what runs on iStuff, lots of platforms have primary goals, and secondary goals can be filled by developer community. Absolutely same here, you have full powers to do whatever you want to do.
Apple: "Oh if you want those features, go ahead and develop them on your own." If I knew how to I would have done it already. What kind of advice is that? Seriously lol
Seriously lol you can evangelize your needs, try to do project-management like activities, sketches, etc - and try involving other volunteer developers. Instead of being an 'entrepreneur', what would be of benefit to everyone, you end up being a whiner.
If you really want to introduce lots of bad analogies, I should try to come up with my own. "As I don't drive, I need government pay for my personal driver, as they have roads out there!" I hope the analogy was bad enough! :)
Once you approach developer community, there's huge difference between:
"Hello folks, are there any projects in improving manageability/look/etc for third-party users?" from "I've gone through a lot of frustrations.", "mediawiki and it's limitations", "why can't the money be put into making a modern product instead of in pockets of the people who run it", etc
I am amazed and I glorify the way how kindly some members of mailing list manage to take that, and try to put some sense into your head.
Domas
2010/3/5 Chris Lewis yecheondigital@yahoo.com:
I agree 100%, especially the part I bolded. Also god bless the developers and extension writers for doing this out of their own free time, I guess I misunderstood the process and thought wikimedia had a code team that was paid.
Some developers are paid employees/contractors, some are not. Obviously the paid developers do what WMF wants them to do (which generally means doing stuff that benefits WMF primarily, not 3rd party users per se) and volunteer developers do whatever the hell they want (and in Chad's case that means overhauling the installer specifically for 3rd party users,
Also I saw on a news site: "The foundation has snared an $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation for the project and plans to assemble a five-person team to identify what exactly is turning some users off." $890,000 for only a 5 man team? It would be great if this money went into some of the common changes people need.
As you quoted, it's a grant, so it's money with strings attached: WMF either gets $890k that they have to spend on what Stanton wants them to do (the usability project), or they don't get the money at all. Also, while $890k sounds like a lot of money, software developers in the San Francisco Bay Area cost a lot of money (cost of living is high there, and there's plenty of big for-profit companies around trying to hire the same people), and there's more costs than just those 5 people's salaries.
They were not back in 2005 =)
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since then.
We have heard. It's just that no one has cared since 2005 apart from the aforementioned Stanton-funded usability team, which developed the Vector skin. Like I said before, if WMF can't or won't dedicate one of their few developers' time to something and no one in the volunteer community cares, it doesn't happen.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
2010/3/5 Chris Lewis yecheondigital@yahoo.com:
They were not back in 2005 =)
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since then.
We have heard. It's just that no one has cared since 2005 apart from the aforementioned Stanton-funded usability team, which developed the Vector skin. Like I said before, if WMF can't or won't dedicate one of their few developers' time to something and no one in the volunteer community cares, it doesn't happen.
On the bright side, it could still look like this: http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage
Magnus
* Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com [Fri, 5 Mar 2010 12:15:46 +0100]:
2010/3/5 Chris Lewis yecheondigital@yahoo.com:
They were not back in 2005 =)
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since
then.
We have heard. It's just that no one has cared since 2005 apart from the aforementioned Stanton-funded usability team, which developed the Vector skin. Like I said before, if WMF can't or won't dedicate one of their few developers' time to something and no one in the volunteer community cares, it doesn't happen.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
When one looks for educational / academic content, rich and colorful interface only distracts the reader. The following site is not mediawiki / monobook based, yet the visual design is simple: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html There is nothing wrong with it. Actually, there is real beauty in simpicity. Dmitriy
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
- Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com [Fri, 5 Mar 2010 12:15:46
+0100]:
2010/3/5 Chris Lewis yecheondigital@yahoo.com:
They were not back in 2005 =)
In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since
then.
We have heard. It's just that no one has cared since 2005 apart from the aforementioned Stanton-funded usability team, which developed the Vector skin. Like I said before, if WMF can't or won't dedicate one of their few developers' time to something and no one in the volunteer community cares, it doesn't happen.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
When one looks for educational / academic content, rich and colorful interface only distracts the reader. The following site is not mediawiki / monobook based, yet the visual design is simple: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html There is nothing wrong with it. Actually, there is real beauty in simpicity. Dmitriy
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Agree wholeheartedly. Sleek graphics and spinny Ajax loaders do not inherently make a good design. It's about pleasing the eye and being as intuitive as possible. We've got a general bug open[1] for cleaning up the UI and drafting some standards for future UI work. I really like where [[Manual:Coding conventions]] has gone in terms of defining what we expect from our programmers. Something similar (Manual:UI Conventions?) would help in setting a standard to expect when creating our user interfaces.
On a semi-related note: I'm going to plug The Smashing Book[2] as a good read for MediaWiki developers. It's got a lot of really good information on Usability, UI, optimization techniques, color usages, etc and makes for a well-rounded read for people working on web apps. I know Andrew and Guillaume both have copies as well and (as far as I know) have enjoyed it.
-Chad
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/13747 [2] http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/03/smashing-book-its-out-now/
Dmitriy Sintsov wrote:
When one looks for educational / academic content, rich and colorful interface only distracts the reader. The following site is not mediawiki / monobook based, yet the visual design is simple: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html There is nothing wrong with it. Actually, there is real beauty in simpicity. Dmitriy
The visual design is fine here, but information architecture is seriously lacking here.
Of course, it's hard to design a navigation interface for a heterogeneous collection of concepts as you see here, but the alphabetical index doesn't play as well online as it does in print. The eye and hand can scan alphabetically much faster in a book than you can do online.
There are the really obvious problems that show up in alphabetical listings: for instance, many people forget to fold "The" when they do queries against online library catalog systems; more modern systems ought to do the folding for you automatically, but there's really no incentive for libraries to improve the services they offer their patrons. Similarly, today it's pretty reasonable for a system to accomodate people who are looking for "Adorno, Theodore" or "Theodore Adorno".
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