Frankly I can't work out your problem. You hark on a lot about how
great things were, or are, in other software, and other little asides,
but rarely do you actually pose a specific question. The ways I learnt
about MediaWiki are a) using Wikipedia, b) experimenting - trial &
error, c) this mailing list and lastly and most recently, the book
mentioned on this list, which I was given a review copy of.
I appreciate you (seem to be) installing MediaWiki on your own Windows
server, which is clearly more complex than the shared hosting I use.
On 06/06/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon(a)uspto.gov> wrote:
Thanks Paul,
I experience your contribution (below) as coming from a real straight
shooter, concise, well thought out and thoughtfully presented, and based
on your own experience. What more can I ask? Thank you very much. I
find your insights informative and very useful, perfectly said and
presentable to my boss when asking for money, "See, I'm not the only one
needing support for a wiki in$tallation!" Thanks also for the
recommendation of "Jim Wilson, can't recommend him enough!" I now know
better where you're coming from, and I feel better informed to take what
you have learned and shared, and adapt and adopt it to my own situation.
Me? I use Intuit Quicken for DOS from the 1980s (fits on one floppy).
It's an incredibly sophisticated relational database. I see multiple
bank accounts in the same database as I see multiple wikis on one MySQL.
I see transfers between bank accounts as I see shared resources in
groups of wikis. I see Quicken's multiple levels of categories and
classes as extremely intelligent for sorting and selecting, making
reports, and changing them globally on the fly as I see ... wait a
minute, media wiki's categories aren't very powerful, and there are no
classes. Quicken looks ahead of my typing for anything, and suggests
matches, and offers to create anything new I type without having to exit
from the immediate data entry task to reconfigure anything. MediaWiki
allows quick page building the same way, but scant little else. In my
Quicken, backup and restore, creating new databases and new accounts,
and reconfiguring the whole program are simple, I even backup to an
email attachment and save it on the web, program and all. MediaWiki has
none of these features for the whole program, for just your data, or
even just your custom configurations. Like open source programmers, the
people who designed Quicken were paid nothing at the time (one
difference, though, the paper stock Quicken-designers were paid with
turned out to be worth $14,000 an hour when Intuit finally went
public!).
My point is that 20 years ago, many of the things I expect in any
modern, sophisticated software were already well worked out and well
established. And I'm not even talking about Word Perfect or Lotus
1-2-3. I'm sad that the folk in today's open source community are
trying to ride two horses at once - a day job for the rent, and a night
job trying to help their open source baby (or hold the reigns on what
should belong to everyone). Yet, they are not standing on the shoulders
of those who came before them in the arena their customers are begging
them to enter. Is MediaWiki the new FORTRAN, only for programmers and
support staff, or is MediaWiki the new Netscape Navigator/
Communicator/Messenger/Composer, for everyone?
I guess it's 2 cents time. Thank you for yours. That's mine.
Anybody else? Where are you coming from and going to with your
MediaWiki experience?
-- Peter Blaise
=== quotable ===
Paul wrote:
... I have read many of the
messages on the list of the last
few weeks and resisted jumping in
until I saw whether you were going
to find some untapped vein of
knowledge or, more likely, you
would need to do a lot of the
legwork yourself with hints and
near answers.
I do find this mailing list
VERY useful but typically not
because I get the exact answer I
need but more usually because it
sends me off in the right
direction to find it myself. This
is fine with me and I have learnt
a ton in the last 3+ months with
help from some of the regular
posters here.
The lack of comprehensive
documentation, setup instructions
or the like whilst being somewhat
frustrating is something that
playing with MediaWiki you have to
learn to accept, for now. I really
don't know anyone that has the time
to devote to building the type of
documentation you are looking for
BUT I do suspect that if
sponsorship were available there
would be candidates. ...
sponsorship of an open source
project from ... an organization
would be interesting indeed.
This isn't to say that people
are only motivated solely by money
but they have to pay their bills
which personally I find absolutely
fine.
I myself needed some extensive
changes made to the Mediawiki UI
and after spending a few days
looking I realized that Mediawiki
is a complete beast when it comes
to the construction of the UI and
it's associated CSS.
I took the admittedly easy
way out and simply got an expert
(Jim Wilson, can't recommend him
enough!) to author a custom skin
(
www.scribas.com/archives which
does everything we need. The site
is currently in stealth mode and
offline but you get a feel for
what it will look like.
The easier parts of Mediawiki,
for me, have always been the data
driven components. Data is data is
data and so I have been able to
change pretty much whatever I want
by virtue of the fact that the data
is stored in a known and well
documented system, MySQL. Actually,
on that note we are soon to be
looking to migrate the index from
MySQL to Lucene for fast cross-site
searching/indexing of Mediawiki and
Drupal.
Anyway, the reason for my post.
I could be way off track here but I
suspect that a lot of the, admittedly
logical, requests you have
generated whilst being perfectly
reasonable within the black box,
vendor supported world are just a
little ahead of their time in the
Mediawiki/open source world.
Be it Drupal, Wordpress,
Joomla, Mediawiki, or whatever open
source project I think you will
always hear gripes about the
documentation and feedback in the
event of bug/problem. I don't
think mediawiki is any worse
or better in this regard and in
fact having tested three other
wikis I would say it is without
doubt the most solid out there.
So...the solution? I don't
think there is one in the short
term. As much as I would love to
see comprehensive documentation I
wont be holding my breath. Instead,
I research, ask questions and
generally make progress with help
from this mailing list. Ideal? No,
but you pays your money and takes
your choice. I could have gone to
socialtext and got a fully supported
wiki but the cost would have been
significant. Mediawiki is 'free' but
comes with a sometimes costly lack
of support framework.
Oh, and the reason, in my
humble opinion, for the fact that
you see several names for the same
entity is possibly quite simple.
There are hundreds of contributors,
each using slightly different
phraseology.
Regards, Paul
[more on Scribas visual design at
http://webdesign.parkertorrence.com/zfrog/portfolio/scribas/ ]
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