[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Sheldon Rampton<sheldon at prwatch.org> wrote:
>[...]
> If you look at Wikipedia pages and really compare them to what has now
> become state-of-the-art website design, it's hard to avoid the
> conclusion that Wikipedia looks a lot like Web 1.0 rather than Web
> 2.0. Web design has come a long way since Wikipedia was launched. Many
> websites now integrate video very nicely and use Javascript/AJAX to
> improve user-friendliness and make pages more interactive and dynamic.
> The semantic web is also becoming more than a buzzword, and it's not
> hard to imagine a "Wikipedia 2.0" that would incorporate those sorts
> of features to become even more useful, attractive and popular than it
> already is. So why aren't those features already in place? Because the
> huge weight of Wikipedia's millions of articles and users makes it
> inevitable that introducing those sorts of features will be more
> technically challenging than if someone were to design those same
> features for a website that only has a small number of articles and
> users. In short, path dependence means that Wikipedia's very success
> makes it harder in some ways for the project to innovate and improve.

A large part of that is that programming full "Web 2.0" with all the
bells and whistles seems to take more attention / effort / skill than
we can reasonably expect out of our current editors.

I don't spend all day comparing Wiki software, but I've used most of
what's available, and MediaWiki is on the good side for usability and
features.  On the down side, as you mentioned, no WYSIWYG yet and
templates suck now.

Most of the things that are Web 2.0 GUI have extremely limited
functional sets compared to what we're using.  Perhaps it's possible
to reconceptualize the whole Wiki concept in terms of the function
sets those websites can do well, and do a complete new code base which
could do those sorts of things to build an encyclopedia wiki.  I've
seen a lot of people who wanted to make a better underlying engine
than MW stand up and say that it should be done.  I have seen
approximately zero actual functional specification, UI specification,
or code.

If someone wants to do that - great.  It's a hugely nontrivial
problem, but it's also clearly within the scope of what a well formed
open source development team could accomplish, and it ultimately is
probably what will happen.

If nobody does in the short term, however - we need to evolve MW in
some clear and obvious ways given its current challenges.  Everyone
knows that the templates and UI improvement and WYSIWYG are desirable
next major improvement steps to evolve MW (I hope).


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com