On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 09:12:47PM -0700, George Herbert wrote:
You have a pot of screws and a hammer. Purchase a screwdriver.
I have a real document management system. Several, in fact.
I also have a Wiki at (place I contract at) Work (Twiki), and at (contracting company I work for) Work (MediaWiki, in deployment now).
In both of those cases, the ability to ensure that non-employees aren't using the collaboration tools (Wiki, document management software, internal websites, internal sysadmin tools) is not only good business sense, but is at one of those locations a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit control.
Wikis are just as useful in environments where complete freedom of data access is not acceptable from a business standpoint. The employee community may be smaller than "everyone in the world", but the type and quality of interaction within the community can be helped greatly by Wikis and other modern internet collaboration.
"All information should be free!" likely does not extend as far as "...including your 401K manager's internal security data and all your health records", even for die-hard info-libertarians.
Some of these environments will benefit from Wikis; many of them will require additional access control. It's unreasonable to expect that MediaWiki would never find itself installed in such a situation.
You're missing his point, though, George:
MediaWiki happily doesn't claim to provide those features, so if you spec it into those environments, *you've* screwed up. You're welcome to patch it to do anything you like, or pay someone else to, though.
If MediaWiki doesn't fill your needs, and you can't patch it to do so, you're welcome to use something else; Tim and brion won't be offended.
That said, see my other reply.
Cheers, -- jra