Hi Dan,
thanks a lot for the insights to the vistaprint MediaWiki ecosystem.
Did you give Semantic MediaWiki a try?
/Alexander
Am 07.02.2013 22:31, schrieb Daniel Barrett:
Vistaprint (
www.vistaprint.com) has a hugely
successful MediaWiki system internally. 150,000+ topics, 1000+ active users across several
continents, five years of history, and a fully supported team of developers to create
extensions. (We are looking into open-sourcing some of them.)
The main requests from our corporate users are:
0. WYSIWIG editor. No surprise here.
1. A desire for a department to have "their own space" on the wiki. I'm not
talking about access control, but (1) customized look& feel, and (2) ability to
narrow searches to find articles only within that space. The closest related concept in
MediaWiki is the namespace, which can have its own CSS styling, and you can search within
a namespace using Lucene with the syntax "NamespaceName:SearchString". However,
this is not a pleasant solution, because it's cumbersome to precede every article
title with "NamespaceName: " when you create, link, and search.
If the *concept* of namespaces could be decoupled from its title syntax, this would be a
big win for us. So a namespace would be a first-class property of an article (like it is
in the database), and not a prefix of the article title (at the UI level). I've been
thinking about writing an extension that provides this kind of UI when creating articles,
searching for them, linking, etc.
Some way to search within categories reliably would also be a huge win. Lucene provides
"incategory:" but it misses all articles with transcluded category tags.
2. Hierarchy. Departments want not only "their own space," they want
"subspaces" beneath it. For example, "Human Resources" wiki area with
sub-areas of Payroll, Benefits, and Recruiting. I realize Confluence supports this... but
we decided against Confluence because you have to choose an article's area when you
create it (at least when we evaluated Confluence years ago). This is a mental barrier to
creating an article, if you don't know where you want to put it yet. MediaWiki is so
much better in this regard -- if you want an article, just make it, and don't worry
where it "goes" since the main namespace is flat.
I've been thinking about writing an extension that superimposes a hierarchy on
existing namespaces, and what the implications would be for the rest of the MediaWiki UI.
It's an interesting problem. Anyone tried it?
3. Tools for organizing large groups of articles. Categories and namespaces are great,
and the DPL extension helps a lot. But when (say) the Legal department creates 700
articles that all begin with the words "Legal department" (e.g., "Legal
department policies", "Legal department meeting 2012-07-01", "Legal
department lunch", etc.), suddenly the AJAX auto-suggest search box becomes a real
pain for finding Legal department articles. This is SO COMMON in a corporate environment
with many departments, as people try to game the search box by titling all their articles
with "Legal department"... until suddenly it doesn't scale and they're
stuck. I'd like to see tools for easily retitling and recategorizing large numbers of
articles at once.
4. Integration with popular corporate tools like MS Office, MS Exchange, etc. We've
spent thousands of hours doing this: for example, an extension that embeds an Excel
spreadsheet in a wiki page (read-only, using a $10,000 commercial Excel-to-HTML translator
as a back-end), and we're looking at embedding Exchange calendars in wiki pages next.
5. Corporate reorganizations and article titles. In any company, the names and
relationships of departments change. What do you do when 10,000 wiki links refer to the
old department name? Sure, you can move the article "Finance department" to
"Global Finance department" and let redirects handle the rest: now your links
work. But they still have the old department name, and global search-and-replace is truly
scary when wikitext might get altered by accident. Also, there's the category called
"Finance department". You can't rename categories easily. I know you can do
it with Pywikipedia, but it's slow and risky (e.g., Pywikipedia used to have a bug
that killed<noinclude> tags around categories it changed). Categories should be
fully first-class so renames are as simple as article title changes.
Hope this was insightful/educational...
DanB
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