Chris Lewis wrote:
I hope I am emailing this to the right group.
It is.
My concern was about mediawiki and it's limitations, as well as it's outdated methods. As someone wo runs a wiki, I've gone through a lot of frustrations.
Maybe you should list your frustrations? It maybe a problem on interfaces/documentation rather than mediawiki itself being difficult.
If Wordpress is like Windows 7, then Mediawiki is Windows 2000. Very outdated GUI, outdated ways of doing things, for example using ftp to edit the settings of the wiki instead of
having a direct interface like Wordpress.
There's the experimental http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Configurator
Mediawiki makes millions more than Wordpress does too, why can't the money be put into making a modern product instead of in pockets of the people who run it? I know Wordpress and Mediawiki serve two different purposes, but that's not the point. In short, it's time to spend some money from those millions of dollars from donations to make this software more modern.
The Wikimedia Foundation gets money to run its sites. That's mostly salaries, servers and bandwidth, not mediawiki software.
You can view http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports
The point is, one is modern and user friendly (Wordpress), and the other (Mediawiki) is not. Other complaints: -Default skins are boring
Feel free to offer skins to add by default (the skin design will change soon).
-Very limited in being able to make the wiki look nice like you could with a normal webpage.
Sorry?? It allows admins to style the site however they want.
Have you seen www.csszengarden.com? It's all CSS.
-Better customization so people can get a wiki the way they want. It should be more like the wikis on wikia, except without me having to learn css and php to make those types of customizations. Give me some option, some places to put widgets. Not every wiki is going to be as formal as the ones on wikimedia sites.
Many of those customizations are CSS in the lower layer. As a user you can completely change the way you see almost everything, without having to bug the sysadmins. Also note that using Extension:Gadgets you can install the widgets / appearance designed from other users with a checkbox in your preferences.
How are normal webpages easier to "make look nice"?
And don't the people at Wikimedia commons get tired of always having to make changes so it actually suits their site? If they had some of the options from the get go, i'm sure they'd appreciate it too.
Please document that change you want done. Wikimedia Commons has many javascript customizations, but it's also because it's easier to "fix" problems with a javascript than developing a php fix and waiting for it to go live.
-A major pain to update! Wordpress upgrades are so simple.
Updating mediawii isn't hard. And Wordpress have also had more (and worse) vulnerabilities.
-I don't want to go to my ftp to download my local settings file, add a few lines then reupload it. This is caveman-like behavior for the modern internet. -Being able to manage extensions like wordpress does.
You should still use ftp to copy the extension there, it's not a big problem to configure it at the same time.
Being stubborn in modernizing it will only make this software less relevant in the future if other wiki software companies are willing to do things the people at Wikimedia aren't.
Thank you