[Mediawiki-l] What Wiki are we each working on?

Ian Smith ismith at good.com
Wed Apr 11 15:01:35 UTC 2007


> Peter Blaise's Wiki: Our (US Trademark Office) challenge is how to
> publish laws and rules (which are now in HTML, PDF, and DOC on the
web),
> AND seek community critiques and suggestions that are shared with each
> other in full view (Wiki, right?), BUT leave the "statute as it is
now"
> intact as an uneditable master reference above all suggested
> replacements.  We want more than discussions on the separate
> "discussion" page.  We want people to actually rewrite the laws and
> rules as they would prefer it, ...
> 
> I think this idea has great potential for opening up the law world
wide,
> but off-the-shelf MediaWiki is a tad immature.  Wish me luck.  Ideas?

In my opinion, MediaWiki is *very* mature; it doesn't handle 1.7 billion
hits per day (Wikipedia) without being pretty well-developed.  But
you've got to understand that it is *just* a Wiki.  People come to
MediaWiki looking for discussion forums, blogging, workflow, bug
tracking, and all sorts of other stuff that MW just doesn't do.  You can
extend, hack or otherwise bodge MW to do these things, in the same way
that you can pry out nails with a chisel, but don't blame the chisel for
being immature if it breaks on you.  I think that many people coming
here would be better served by more comprehensive collaboration-site
tools, like TikiWiki.  But if you want the best Wiki around, with the
capability of adding other features on, then MW is for you.

I don't really get the type of system you're trying to create, but I'm
not sure it's a Wiki.  It sounds more like a document management system
with a facility for adding public comments.

OTOH, if you're going to convert all those HTML, PDF, and DOC documents
into Wiki markup, then maybe MW can do this, and maybe it could work
quite well.  How about this: you could check in the "masters" as version
1 on each page, and then simply let people edit the page as they wish.
At the top of the page, you include a "Master" link back to version 1 in
the history, and another link to the diffs between version 1 and
current.

> So, what's everyone else working on?  Can we see?

Private corporate Wiki for software development collaboration.

Ian



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