MediaWiki

    From Consumerium development wiki R&D Wiki
    Revision as of 12:39, 23 September 2004 by Faeries (talk | contribs) ((in the opinion of 142.177.X.X))

    MediaWiki is the software Consumerium uses on its R&D wiki which you are using right now. 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 main difference is that MediaWiki 1.3 has a XML import that is available only to the sysop power structure. This seems to 142.177.X.X to be a ploy to kill off GetWiki, after which support for this feature, which makes it easy to fork off with the GFDL Corpus, will probably (in the opinion of 142.177.X.X) be withdrawn or limited or "bugged up" to make it useless. There is no incentive, (in the opinion of 142.177.X.X) once GetWiki dies, for MediaWiki's developers (some of whom are involved with Wikimedia) to support an XML-based fork. Some, such as Tim Starling, have engaged in activities that strongly suggest (in the opinion of 142.177.X.X) that they deliberately offer tools such as vandalbots to those who attack such services, e.g. 142.177.X.X claims this was done to Recyclopedia. Accordingly it may be better (in the opinion of 142.177.X.X) to stick to GetWiki just to have a hedge against the sysop power structure, which in the opinion of 142.177.X.X controls Mediawiki code.

    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.

    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.

    See also: