Hi! > A lot of the replies were helpful, in particular Ryan Lane and Yaron's > replies. Also made a quick reply to Domas.
Replies are good! > Overall it's awesome no doubt (otherwise I wouldn't have used it in the first > place), but a few of the practices (i.e. editing localsettings file through > shell or ftp) and gui/aesthetics should definitely be more 'modern.' Priorities, priorities. Do note, no GUI will be able to scale to configuration needs most easily explained by pointing at http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/ > In case you haven't heard, it's 2010 lol. A lot has changed since then. Damn, you just shattered my illusion that I'm still young! > The average person who wants to start a wik is gonna have no idea how to do > that, much less even understand what svn up means. While I don't expect to be > dumbed down a huge degree, a little bit more simplicity wouldn't hurt would > it? Average person who doesn't know how to do that can always try out service providers, and service providers can provide more skins and configuration interface, value added! Maybe we could have a shell script that does upgrade, but 'one click upgrade' from the web interface is quite insecure method. Maybe a good enough method would be having a simple shell script that does all that.. >> Feel free to develop it that way. > Easier said than done. Exactly ;-) It is huge engineering effort that may not be entirely aligned with WMF mission. I have done quite a few changes to MediaWiki ages ago to better support my small company wiki needs (e.g. no hassle single sign on) - and somehow those changes got in (probably because, ehem, we didn't have formalized code review back then :-) >> Wikia is heavily modified to give the gui a much more modern feel. Again i'm >> mostly focusing on the aesthetics. Unfortunately I don't think wikia >> distributes their skins. https://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/skins/ Personally I'd like to see more stuff from Wikia to be poached into Wikimedia deployment (we're giving too much time for Wikia to learn from their mistakes, before we learn from theirs :) > It's not just not my needs. It's about user friendliness for anyone who is > using wikimedia to work on their wiki project. While the developers have no > obligation to do it, it would be nice if they realized who their users are > other than wikimedia. Everyone realizes that there're users other than Wikimedia. It is one of reasons why mediawiki has plethora of features that are not needed on Wikimedia sites (and that introduces code complexity). It is also one of reasons why 'mediawiki' is 'mediawiki' and not 'wikimedia software' Of course, Wikimedia use quite often stands in the way of development (as features have to be secure, scale nicely and maintainable in medium-large sized operations environments) - and unfortunately for feature development, fortunately for everyone who runs large mediawiki instances, those needs have to be in the core of project. > These types of replies are hilarious. It's like > Iphone user: "Dear Apple, if your iphone had the following features it would > be great (A) (B) (C) ... " If you missed, iphone also has 3rd party application community. (a), (b), (c) features have been developed by third parties already, or there's a niche for those third parties. Of course iphone economy is much fancier than mediawiki economy, so probably niches aren't filled here as fast. You know, Microsoft didn't write every application for Windows, Apple doesn't own everything what runs on iStuff, lots of platforms have primary goals, and secondary goals can be filled by developer community. Absolutely same here, you have full powers to do whatever you want to do. > Apple: "Oh if you want those features, go ahead and develop them on your own." > If I knew how to I would have done it already. What kind of advice is that? > Seriously lol Seriously lol you can evangelize your needs, try to do project-management like activities, sketches, etc - and try involving other volunteer developers. Instead of being an 'entrepreneur', what would be of benefit to everyone, you end up being a whiner. If you really want to introduce lots of bad analogies, I should try to come up with my own. "As I don't drive, I need government pay for my personal driver, as they have roads out there!" I hope the analogy was bad enough! :) Once you approach developer community, there's huge difference between: "Hello folks, are there any projects in improving manageability/look/etc for third-party users?" from "I've gone through a lot of frustrations.", "mediawiki and it's limitations", "why can't the money be put into making a modern product instead of in pockets of the people who run it", etc I am amazed and I glorify the way how kindly some members of mailing list manage to take that, and try to put some sense into your head. Domas _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
