Hi! > In what way do you think that MediaWiki is not designed to promote and > foster online collaboration?
Depends on purpose of collaboration. For some things - like project maintenance, planning, tracking, etc. - it's far from the best. Deep discussion is also not without friction (phab is not ideal in that regard either btw) - keeping track of several discussions becomes very hard, especially if a number of people participates. Flow may make matters better but it's not enabled everywhere, and not on mediawiki.org. That said, for collaborative document editing MediaWiki is not bad - but definitely can use some improvement. Things that specifically come to mind are: 1. Ability to comment directly on parts of text. Right now to discuss the paragraph you need to go to talk, and then each time go back and forth to keep in mind what we're talking about. High friction. 2. Ability to submit/approve changes. I know "be bold" works well in some cases, but in others I wouldn't presume to edit somebody's text without their approval. However, if I could submit an edit for their consideration, which they might approve - that might work better. 3. Better diff notifications (you mentioned it). The delta for MediaWiki to become good task/project management is very big IMHO, so I'm not sure it makes sense to go there instead of using existing solutions. >> frequently called for ArchCom-RFC authors to move the bulk of the >> prose of their RFCs onto mediawiki.org. However, Phabricator is >> really good tool for a couple of things: >> 1. Doling out short unique identifiers of tasks, events, etc > > Every page in MediaWiki is assigned a unique page_id. You can visit an It does. I'm not sure the UI allows you to discover this fact though. OTOH, I agree that textual IDs are better for many things when we're talking about unique documents (a-la RFCs). For stuff like bugs or fine-grained tasks, IDs usually work better though. > work on improving MediaWiki's search, while Phab doesn't support basic > features like stemming. I'm generally a fan of Phabricator as a bug > tracker - not as a collaborative document editing platform. I agree here. For collaborative document editing Phabricator is not the best solution, and IMHO not better than MediaWiki. This of course is general things, not specific to decision to use Phab for specific task of CfP, which Quim seems to have decided already. -- Stas Malyshev [email protected] _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
