[Mediawiki-l] Thoughts on enterprise MediaWiki?

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

I'm planning on moderating a discussion on MediaWiki in the enterprise
(businesses, not the starship) next week at Wikimania (Friday, 8/4), and
I'm hoping to kick off a pre-discussion about that here.  My motives
aside, this conversation doesn't need to be about my session to be on
topic...I'm interested in a general conversation about MediaWiki in the
enterprise.

I should start off with a disclaimer to the core MediaWiki devs here:
my knowledge is mainly based on 1.5, and my dev chops are a little rusty
right now.  You'll see some half-baked ideas below that I'm planning to,
um, bake a little bit in the next week.  I'm also planning on being
around for at least some of Wednesday and all of Thursday of Hacking
Days, so I'm happy to discuss then if asked. 

Regardless of whether you're going to Wikimania or the session, I'd like
to hear from you if you have thoughts on the subject.  Specifically:

*  Users: what sorts of things are you doing?
*  Developers: what are the most frequent feature requests from intranet
users?  What are the most annoying ones?  Which are the best that
haven't been implemented yet?
*  Propsective session attendees: I'm really interested in anything you
have to say about what you hope to get out of the conversation.

Here's some things that I see as potential things to discuss:
*  Authentication plugins.  The authentication interface is very
good...it's gotten a fair workout from a number of angles (particularly,
LDAP).  Seems to be reasonably mature.
*  Authorization plugins - not much as of MediaWiki 1.5....I'm guessing
not much has changed.  I'm planning to possibly discuss ways in which
User.php could be overridden, extended, and/or stabilized as an
extension interface.  The idea would be a system where group memberships
are stored in an external database, as well as capability assignments
(e.g. LDAP group "admins" gets the "edit" capability on resource
"MediaWiki: namespace")   This is admittedly pretty fuzzy right now.
*  More robust read-access controls (and more granular access control in
general).  Oft requested, oft rejected.  I'm interested in starting a
conversation about what interfaces could be added to the code such that
an ACL-maniac extension to MediaWiki could exist, without a big support
burden on the core team.  Before replying to this, please read Brion's
reply to me from November, 2005 on this subject: 
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki/8610
*  New distribution mechanisms.  There's already a Debian package for
MediaWiki, I'm assuming there's an RPM out there.  Does a PEAR
distribution make sense?  Does it make sense to package MediaWiki
extensions as .deb/.rpm/PEAR thingies?
*  Structured data - I know that in my last job, there were several
things we used a wiki in lieu of a database for (e.g. we kept a list of
new licensees of our technology on a wiki).  It was nice, because we had
the flexibility to add fields willy-nilly.  So, it may be interesting to
discuss the enterprise applicability of projects like 
*   Training - it's often hard to get someone who is used to mailing
around Word docs as attachments to use a wiki with its
{{{random-adjective}}} syntax instead of WYSIWYG.  How do folks deal
with it?

So, that's just some top of my head ideas.  Others?

Those are some of my thoughts for now.  I'm hoping to get more organized
as Friday draws closer.

For those interested in the session, the details are here:
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_talk:RL1

The talk page for the page above is a good discussion venue for items
that aren't of general interest on this list.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,
Rob