This is likely the right list. Are you aware of the Wikipedia usability initiative? Have you seen the new skin they are creating (Vector), or the awesome new features they are adding? If not, please see the usability wiki: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page The skin system is also likely to have a major update in a very future version of MediaWiki. Look through this list's archives, the discussion was fairly recent. Minus making new skins (which is fairly difficuly), I think this is a matter of opinion and skill. I don't really find updates to be terribly difficult. You mostly just check out (or download) the newest version, and run update.php. This is probably more difficult without shell access. I'd like to mention that from a security perspective, I like the fact that by default MediaWiki does not allow Wordpress style upgrades and code modifications. MediaWiki exploits may lead to vandalism, but Wordpress exploits generally lead to shell or root access, and compromise of all of your other applications. Get a host that supports SSH. Use VI, Emacs, nano, pico, etc. It looks like someone may try to tackle this as a summer of code project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jeroen_De_Dauw/GSoC2010 MediaWiki is written primarily for use for Wikimedia foundation sites. They generously make the software usable for third party sites, but they have no obligation to do so. If the users of Wikimedia foundation sites are happy with the software, and end-users are happy with the Wikimedia foundation sites (and I'd say thats a resounding yes), then the millions going to the Wikimedia foundation are well spent. You are more than welcome to submit patches, and/or help develop the features you want. I maintain a number of extensions, and have worked with the MediaWiki code base for a number of years. I've found the Wikimedia foundation, and the core developers to be very welcoming of improvements to the software. Respectfully, Ryan Lane

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 8:30 PM, Chris Lewis <yecheondigital(a)yahoo.com> wrote: This is not a wrong list for this, though there's no perfect one. All of this in my humble opinion - and please keep in mind that I'm not a core developer of the MW code, though I do PHP and other programming and web apps design on and off... There have been for several years at least on and off extensive discussions about the software platform, a next-generation MediaWiki concept, etc. In general, such discussions have ended when backwards compatibility problems poke up. The existing software set is extremely complicated and featureful - and, regrettably, most of that complexity and features set is in active use within the Wikipedia and related sites environments. A clean-sheet design which could throw out compatibility would undoubtedly be easier and cleaner and could be done with reasonable chances of project success. However, converting Wikipedia and related sites to a non-backwards-compatible environment seems ruinously impractical at the moment. The reality of the situation is that MediaWiki isn't the Wikimedia Foundation's product; the information content in Wikipedia and the other projects is the WMF's product, and the MediaWiki software is a spinoff. To the degree that MediaWiki is useful to people, that's great. To the degree that changes to the software would negatively affect the information in Wikipedia and other projects, though, the software is very much a secondary concern. In this sense, the software is very user driven, but it's not driven by the median installation (many thousands of small MW wikis out there), but by the one huge one (Wikipedia and related projects). Donations to the Foundation are nearly entirely focused on the information content and delivery - with some acknowledgement that software development has to happen to support that - but not donations intended to improve the software itself. Adding in a backwards compatibility mode to a new clean-sheet project seems to more or less require grafting a full MediaWiki installation on the side as a plugin module, as currently understood, which more or less renders the point of a new clean-sheet project moot. One could possibly design a new wiki system as a pass-through layer, with MW as a back end and with functionality being migrated forwards into the new system over time as people got used to it. I think there's an opportunity either for a reconceptualized enterprise oriented MW like system, but done in a clean sheet project and partly or entirely outside the Wikimedia Foundation, or for such a project as a passthrough layer intended to eventually replace MW and done within the Foundation. Whether either of these will ever happen I don't know. The most common Wikis seem to be MediaWiki (with all its warts), Twiki (with all its lack of functionality and administrative warts), and SharePoint (*cough*gack* - though I use it, too). None of these is optimal for the typical wiki environment, users or administrators. We seem to be muddling through. I know open source software developers with large software project architect and management experience; I've asked some of them about this. They agree it'd be a great idea, if someone else did it. If you happen to know someone else, I have people who would likely commit some supporting coding effort and time and architecture and management experience, including myself. But someone else would have to get the project off the ground and spearhead it. I have too many balls in the air (and a couple in nearby space and suborbital trajectories) at the moment... -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 2 March 2010 20:30, Chris Lewis <yecheondigital(a)yahoo.com> wrote: The Wikimedia Foundation makes millions more than Wordpress, but the Foundation is running a top 5 website. That they are able to do that on just a few million is amazing. The other top 5 sites are things like Google than spend billions. Maintaining and improving Mediawiki is just one of the things the Foundation does with its relatively small budget. The only money going into the pockets of the people that run the Foundation is their very reasonable salaries. The board get nothing (except their actual expenses, and some don't even claim those) and there are no shareholders getting profits (the WMF is a charity).

* Chris Lewis <yecheondigital(a)yahoo.com> [Tue, 2 Mar 2010 20:30:20 -0800 (PST)]: like MediaWiki is not like Windows; it is more like Linux. I can type formatted wikitext with links, lists, headers and tables faster than by using MS Office GUI. MindTouch Deku has backend and frontend written in different languages - so, it is harder to install and probably is not suitable to cheap sharing hosting. it also stores data in xml format, which is not the best for "manual" typing. With all recent dramatical improvement of PHP by Facebook (I've impressed with the translator and the xhp), PHP may move from "toy-like" language (as I've heard from local .net developers) to a very serious platform. In fact, these improvements probably are even more important than a long-awaiting PHP 6.0.. http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/xhp-a-new-way-to-write-p… although a mapping of XML to wikitext can be a problem (though the parser uses DOM already).. Maybe a replacement to wgOut, though. Dmitriy

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Chris Lewis <yecheondigital(a)yahoo.com> wrote: There are many, many, many skins available. FTP ??!? No. It's just a file. Configuration files are considered pretty reasonable and reliable by a lot of people. ::shrugs:: In any case… It's Free Software, submit patches. Cheers.

Chris Lewis wrote: For one thing, I'd say that mediawiki aims for a particular market position. Mediawiki is designed to support very large wikis, i.e. 3M pages on one of the most trafficked web sites on Earth. For a large-scale site, there's going to be a lot of administration work to be done, so it doesn't matter if the system is difficult to set up and configure. Wordpress, on the other hand, set out with the mission of being the 'cheap and cheerful' program that would dominate the market for blogging software. Everything about Wordpress is designed to make it easy to set up a Wordpress site quickly and configure it easily. Wordpress does scale OK to fairly large blogs and high traffic if you SuperCache it. If you want a wiki that's easier to set up and administer, I'd consider forking or starting out from scratch. (In the latter case you get complete control of configuration management, which is key)

There is a great difference in business models there. Wordpress and confluence make their money out of third-party applications, WMF makes it money out of donations to keep the Wikipedia going. It would be at best irresponsible to use this money for sole purpose of making the software more useful for 3d parties.. If the 3rd parties are willing to pay a developer or donate money to make MediaWiki more user friendly (like has happened with the usability initiative) that is fine, but do not ask core developers or even volunteers to put any work into this. Cheers, r.

Chiming in on this a little late, but, basically: Yeah, mediawiki isn't that easy to administer. Unfortunately, people administering MediaWiki installs are only one type of user that we have to worry about and resources (as always) are limited. Right now, we're focusing a concentrated effort on making things easier for editors (users generating content), BUT I think administrators are an important group because I hear stories all the time about how administrators for intranet wikis get requests from people in their company for a better way to do X or Y, and they have to write it themselves. I'd love it if there were some easy way to get these administrators who have had to come up with hacks to share what their issues were, what their solutions were, and maybe even push their changes back upstream =) Do people here generally feel this would be a good resource to have? And, more importantly, that it would be used? On 3/2/10 8:30 PM, Chris Lewis wrote: