On 29 December 2010 11:21, MZMcBride z@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.