The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
From a user perspective, MediaWiki provides a simple, feature rich environment for editing and contributing content. Content is handled with a simple WYSIWYG editor that makes editing accessible to anyone by default even without a login. All articles also have a discussion tab that allows readers to comment on the article as well as a history tab that lets you view version history when edits have been made. Its ease of use has no doubt been a contributing factor in the growth of Wikipedia."
Posted Nov 30, 2004 20:24 UTC (Tue)
by Baylink (guest, #755)
[Link] (7 responses)
Everyone seems to think that MW is reasonably easy to install and manage, so I figure why not take the power if it comes without too much complexity. I already know I like the design: I'm a fairly frequent contributor to WP itself.
The only thing, really, that I can see about MW's design that I don't especially like is that it doesn't provide much support for anything other than in-line text. There's a little special-case support for inlining images and tables, but no more complex data structures.
It Would Be Nice If there was a bit more support for editing and displaying more complex aggregations of data (which is to say that I'm not a good enough coder to do it myself, but I'll be glad to tell someone else how :-).
Posted Dec 1, 2004 0:59 UTC (Wed)
by fool (guest, #22248)
[Link]
Posted Dec 1, 2004 14:16 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Dec 1, 2004 15:50 UTC (Wed)
by ikm (guest, #493)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Dec 1, 2004 20:44 UTC (Wed)
by job (guest, #670)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Dec 1, 2004 22:26 UTC (Wed)
by ikm (guest, #493)
[Link] (1 responses)
Using pieces of paper is the most simple solution, by the way, and it doesn't require computers and all associated complexity. However, the most simple solution is not neccessarily the best one. For me personally, MediaWiki is better than anything else I have ever seen. That's only me, though -- and perhaps a bunch of other people who enjoy MediaWiki as much as I do :)
I hope this answers your question.
Posted Dec 2, 2004 17:39 UTC (Thu)
by Baylink (guest, #755)
[Link]
And MediaWiki does.
While they still have a ways to go on things like help text (I gather there's a GFDL/GPL collision on the Wikipedia helptext being included in the package), overall the thing Just Works.
And that's *really* important to me.
Posted Dec 1, 2004 16:02 UTC (Wed)
by frazier (guest, #3060)
[Link]
From their web page:
Here is the result: A PHP powered Wiki using flat files as data storage, built to run on cheap web packages. I'd want something bigger for company use, but for one guy it's the one I load up.
I've been shopping wiki's myself: they seem like an excellent personal notetaking and organizing system, as much as anything else.The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
Give PmWiki <www.pmwiki.org> a try . Pm and the community are receptive to feedback .The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
Using MediaWiki for personal use strikes me as overkill, and storing your personal notes in MySQL crazy. I'd take a long hard look at KWiki which is simplicity itself and easy to extend in Perl, or Instiki which is much the same but with saner defaults and in Ruby.The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
Using a 1Ghz computer to take notes is an overkill, too. But why not? Personally, I don't really care if it uses mysql or not as long as it is quite easy to setup. What I care about is usability, and in that field I have never seen anything better than MediaWiki.The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
Why not a much larger and more complicated software for accomplishing something simple? For one thing it is more difficult to understand, then more difficult to extend, and then bound to have more security problems. I'm sure the speed your your computer is fast enough no matter what, it has nothing to do with it.The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
I thought I already answered: because I like the usability. I like the ability to enter TeX formulas, I like the ability to edit on a per-paragraph basis, I like it's tag set, I like the way it handles history, I like that it hates the CamelCase style just as I do, I like how it looks and how it feels, and perhaps many other things I can't remember right now -- I just like it all.The open source wiki behind Wikipedia (NewsForge)
this is my response as well: I'm not concerned with how big it is (and by my evaluation, MediaWiki isn't *nearly* as big as, say, WebGUI -- WG too me (literally) a week to install; MW... 4 minutes. :-), as whether it comes out of the box functional.And indeed,
The wiki I use for personal use is PWP:
Personal use wiki (NewsForge)
PWP
It will run on that XP box at work when you can't get an additional box and although it isn't very robust (things like nestlested lists weren't in the featureset last time I used it) it is compact and quite usable. I last had it on a standalone 233mhz Cyrix box for a project at home running SME Server. As a benefit, when the hard drive died on my workstation, I had a lot of information out on the wiki island.
Why another Wiki?
I was looking for a PHP or Perl based Wiki that matched my needs. »UseMod is very close - I like it! But I don't like the idea of more than 4.000 lines of Perl code in one single file being loaded on every CGI call. I did not want to use a database backed Wiki. Other flat file Wikis weren't documented or stuck at some beta version. Well, I had to write my own Wiki!