Our organization has been running a twiki (now foswiki) intranet for years, and it's full of information that can't be found easily. That's not completely the fault foswiki, it certainly includes mechanisms for classifying things. But users don't use those mechanisms, and when they do, it's not done in a process-based way so that everyone marks their documentation the same. As an engineer wanting to find information, this was a big problem to me.
I considered several solutions (including "fixing" foswiki) before deciding on Mediawiki / Semantic Mediawiki / Semantic Forms as the basis for a new kind of site that promotes easy cross-referencing and automatic publishing to relevant collection pages. On my site, when a user creates an article in a certain area, a minimum set of area-related tags are attached to it automatically. Additionally, the user can click boxes to further classify their article, and readers are encouraged to add more tags in this way when they find appropriate classifications missing. All of these tags amount to adding [[Has Property::Whatever]] without the user needing to know the syntax. I include the FCKEditor (which is why I'm still stuck with MW 1.16) so that no user needs to learn another meta language before they can convey what they want to in a rich way. I use the tags to populate cross-reference pages, resulting in reducing the need for users to publish their works in the "right place". Whether it's anxiety about picking the right place or laziness, I've seen the "where do I put it?" problem many times, resulting in people linking pages to their personal profile page, and in some cases, dead pages. I have a parametric search form that not only provides results, but also provides the query that they can cut-and-paste into their articles to show dynamic results in whatever they're writing about. I don't think SMW is a bloated piece of software, that's a silly comment that's relative to what an individual needs. But I do believe it's not reasonable for an organization of individuals to have to learn syntax when all they want to do (and all I want them to do) is capture their ideas and work with as few barriers as possible. All of that said, I would never select Mediawiki / Semantic Mediawiki if Semantic Forms and RunQuery were not available to hide Mediawiki / Semantic Mediawiki syntax. So yes, I agree it's complicated, but that's what we're for. My smartphone would be complicated if it weren't for the contact that keeps me from having to remember 50 phone numbers. Regarding performance, I used to have a default home page that showed news, number of automatically linked pages, number of users, locations, user status messages, recent changes, a tag cloud, and a few other things. As the site grew, for some geos it took a while to load compared to the static pages they were used to seeing. So I removed it as the default page and let users set their own home page. We were considering using a Dell Poweredge 1850 as an IT-approved server to hold the site, but it's been drastically slower than the 8GB i5 the site is running on now, and even drastically slower than the 2GB Core 2 I loaded it on for performance testing (which was only a little slower than the i5 as far as page loads). So though I don't have a table of numbers, hardware matters. In addition, this was on apache (LAMP on CentOS). If I start seeing speed issues related to simultaneous users, I'm planning on trying nginx. Unfortunately I can't comment on scaling from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. In my small pond, it has scaled up nicely in terms of content growth, but in some cases scaling needed an assist by re-thinking query content on certain pages. -----Original Message----- From: James HK [mailto:jamesin.hongkon...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 8:13 AM To: Semantic MediaWiki users; Semantic MediaWiki developers Subject: [SMW-devel] Wikitech-l discussion / Is SMW a "bloated piece of software" ? Hi, Most user on this list are probably not aware of the current discussion that takes place on Wikitech-l [1] about "How SMW might help mw.org/wikitech.org" but what caused a moment of silence was the following comment. "I don't support moving to Semantic MediaWiki, which to me as user seems like a somewhat arcane and bloated piece of software that will require me and lots of people to relearn how we write documentation and project tracking" [2] I'm interest to hear if users on this list think that SMW is a "bloated piece of software" with users generally required "to relearn how we write"? Are there reason why such misconception exists among mediawiki users (under the pre-assumption that is not a misconception)? Another issue during the discussion was "general concern has been scalability and perhaps relatedly the ability of users to execute poorly optimized queries (maliciously or otherwise)" [3] Comments about performance related concerns, are those concerns still valid for the current release? Are there any hard evidence that suggests using SMW on a wiki will inevitable decrease performance (comparing numbers not opinions)? [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/68762 [2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/688 27 [3] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/688 46 Cheers ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Minimize network downtime and maximize team effectiveness. Reduce network management and security costs.Learn how to hire the most talented Cisco Certified professionals. Visit the Employer Resources Portal http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/employer_resources/index.html _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Minimize network downtime and maximize team effectiveness. Reduce network management and security costs.Learn how to hire the most talented Cisco Certified professionals. Visit the Employer Resources Portal http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/employer_resources/index.html _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
