On 29 December 2010 11:21, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
> MediaWiki is precisely that software. And
there's any number of
> specialist wikis using it that are basically Wikipedia in a specialist
> area.
No, I don't think MediaWiki is precisely that
software. MediaWiki is a wiki
engine that can be used for a variety of purposes. It may have started out
as a tool to make an encyclopedia, but very shortly after its mission
drifted.
MediaWiki was designed to fit a number of ideas: free dictionary, free
encyclopedia, free news site, free media repo, etc. And thus its design has
been held back in many areas in order to ensure that any change doesn't
break its various use-cases.
No, it's pretty much a simple free-encyclopedia engine. Ask people on
the other projects about how hard it is to get anyone interested in
what they need.
> This sounds like "software that looks to me
on the surface like it was
> actually built for making an encyclopedia". This is, of course, not at
> all the same as success.
I'm not sure what "this" is. Can you
clarify?
Your original statement of what you thought was needed. I'm not
convinced that putting more policy into the engine will make a
Wikipedia killer. There's already rather a lot of
encyclopedia-directed policy in the WMF deploy.
- d.