On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 07:45:19 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
Do you agree?
I still think Mediawiki is the better choice than Gollum if we want a full-fledged wiki. As far as I can see it, a large part of the dissatisfaction with the current wiki is precisely that it doesn't support many of the convenient features people have come to expect from modern wiki software. But Gollum seems to support even less features than the prowiki.org software.
For example, Andrej mentioned above how annoying it was that the prowiki.org search doesn't work properly. Well, Gollum as running on github.com doesn't seem to support search at all!
Or take user management: MediaWiki supports an extensive set of tools for setting permission, banning users, protecting pages, etc., which is proven to work in the real world. On the other hand, I don't think that Gollum, due to its nature, supports any kind of access control besides restricting wiki access to, in our case, d-programming-language.org contributors. This is a problem because an important part of the wiki concept is that everybody can edit all/most of the pages, _without_ prior review. For this to work, you also need to be able to take measures against vandalism.
And for people just browsing the web for information about D, the fact that you can access the wiki pages as a Git repository with Gollum is simply not important at all (offline reading is also possible with MediaWiki, by the way, as commonly done with Wikipedia on mobile devices before the ubiquity of high-speed mobile internet connections).
Well, it could quite possibly be that I am biased since I have a non-trivial number of contributions on two language editions of Wikipedia, but I still think that while the GitHub wiki is nice for having one or two pages of documentation with a few links for an open source project with zero effort, if we want a full-blown wiki for collecting and organization information about D, MediaWiki would be the best bet.
It would certainly help to reduce the »awkwardness factor« of the current solution – after all, it is used by Wikipedia, many Linux distributions (Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Suse, …), KDE, OpenOffice, and many other open source projects. Compared to it, most instances of other wiki systems almost invariably feel like a pile of mess to me.
David
