MediaWiki
MediaWiki (.org) is the software Consumerium uses on its R&D wiki which you are using right now.
Figuring out how to best use it's extra namespaces, templates, categories, extensions and widgets for achieving Consumium goals.
mw:MediaWiki history and mw:Roadmap shed light on the developments of the MediaWiki software from Magnus Manske's original "PhaseIII" code rewrite into PHP Who'd known that PHP scripts run one of the planets biggest sites Wikipedia and has thus been proven to scale to serve tens of thousands or even hundereds thousands of requests per second.
During the years of it's evolution MediaWiki has grown to include novel ways of extending the software with possibility to have categories, extra namespaces, templates, MediaWiki/extensions and later on with MediaWiki/widgets
It is one of several wiki code options, seemingly the one that has a wikitext standard suitable for large numbers of people to collaborate on in many languages. http://mediawiki.org
It is not however ideal as a piece of code to work with our hardware requirements or protocol requirements, e.g. it does not currently integrate with any mobile device code, chat code otherwise then that the people using the Wikis might also be using IM, such as irc or email to communicate with each other. Nor does it implement some features of the content wiki or opinion wiki that will be needed eventually to deliver Consumerium Services such as signing versions of articles, which is needed for non-centralized integrity burden of proof.
Therefore its use at present is really just a test, and to make it easier to collate text from other GFDL services, most of which also use mediawiki. Consumerium developers will have to make their choices based also on the constraints the Consumerium License might place on using GPL'd code. This might not be an issue, or it might be a huge issue, we just don't know. The MediaWiki 1.3 release is now available and should be compared to GetWiki.
The long term choices of wiki code and its integration with other code are things the Consumerium Governance Organization will decide, and this Development Wiki is here to discuss. As part of reflexive design, we will generally use the tools we are trying to test, before deciding to use them. This will often bias sysops and others in favour of what is in use now! We should be very aware of this systemic bias.
New features in MediaWiki
mw:Release notes need to be read through to map which functionality was added when and then in a timeline article match what the Consumium design paradigm to getter a better view.
As of version 1.3.3 MediaWiki supports any number of additional namespaces, which is very good for us. Now we can have namespaces for companies, products etc.
The current development branch of 1.4 now contains an email notification patch for watched pages and User-pages called Enotif. See m:Enotif for more precise info
See also:
- Content wiki
- Opinion wiki
- MediaWiki modifications - For figuring out what has to be hacked, why and how