* Neil Kandalgaonkar <[email protected]> [Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:40:13 -0800]: > Thanks... I know this is a provocative question but I meant it just as > it was stated, nothing more, nothing less. For better or worse my > history with the foundation is too short to know the answers to these > questions. > > All the assumptions in my question are up for grabs, including the > assumption that we're even primarily developing MediaWiki for WMF > projects. Maybe we think it's just a good thing for the world and that's > that. > > Anyway, I would question that it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep > the core small -- it seems to me that more and more of the things we use > to power the big WMF projects are being pushed into extensions and > templates and difficult-to-reproduce configuration and even data entered > directly into the wiki, commingled indistinguishably with documents. (As > you are aware, it takes a lot of knowledge to recreate Wikipedia for a > testing environment. ;) > > Meanwhile, MediaWiki is perhaps too powerful and too complex to > administer for the small organization. I work with a small group of > artists that run a MediaWiki instance and whenever online collaboration > has to happen, nobody in this group says "Let's make a wiki page!" That > used to happen, but nowadays they go straight to Google Docs. And that > has a lot of downsides; no version history, complex to auth credentials, > lack of formatting power, can't easily transition to a doc published on > a website, etc. > MediaWIki wasn't always so complex. The first version, I've used in 2007 (1.9.3) was reasonably simpler than current 1.17 / 1.18 revisions. And one might learn it gradually, step by step in many months or even years. Besides of writing extensions for various clients, I do use it for my own small memo / blog, where I do put code samples, useful links (bookmarking) and a lot of various texts (quotations and articles to read later).
To me, a standalone MediaWiki on a flash drive sounds like a good idea. However, there are many limitations, although SQLite support have become much better and there is a Nanoweb http server; some computers might already listen to 127.0.0.1:80. I wish it was possible to run a kind of web server with system sockets, or even no sockets at all, however browsers probably do not support this :-( Otherwise, one should pre-run a port scanner (not a very good thing). Dmitriy _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
