About the virtues of MediaWiki software. On 04/03/2013 12:30 AM, Ori Livneh wrote:
The core of MediaWiki is in my mind still radical and exciting: you make or find a page, click edit, and just type into it.
I agree, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why we are still here and not at [your preferred CMS].
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Wikitech_contributors doesn't remove any MediaWiki feature: all are there. Contributors can create and edit regular wiki pages as always.
The use of Semantic Forms is proposed to solve specific cases where a form and a predefined page structure is useful: user profiles, projects, tasks, events and nodes. And even all these specific types of pages include the beloved bug textarea taking the usual functionality.
For an example look http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Wikitech_node_concept.jpg
The first central block "Node: Lua" is your old free-form wiki page. The rest would be aggregated automatically thanks to the structured data introduced elsewhere by a bunch of users, collaboratively.
Yes, you could do all that templating and categorization manually... But it requires a lot more editor knowledge and discipline in exchange of a higher risk of driving people away and breaking things. So yes, I believe that using forms for specific types of pages is a good idea.
-- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
