Thomas Dukleth wrote:
For those who lack sufficient time to consider proper reasoning, I present my brief conclusion before the analysis on which it is based. I favour testing a good multi-lingual implementation of MediaWiki modeled largely on the Wikipedia implementation which I expect to be the best wiki choice for the long term future of the Koha project, especially in relation to support for internationalisation. [...]
Oops! I've even lacked sufficient time to read this email until now! Is it proper reasoning if it can't be expressed concisely? ;-) I'm happy to see that the content licensing might be solved as a consequence and that people are willing to work on farming the wiki, but I don't believe that mediawiki is the best (or even a good) solution. To be clear, I am disappointed with the preselection of mediawiki apparently mainly on grounds of popularity (which is repeated to argue for everything from translations to scalability), while ignoring its many configuration and accessibility problems and that it arguably is not even a wiki. I'm not going to Fisk the whole essay, but I'll comment on a few: Is "a good multi-lingual implementation of MediaWiki" even possible? If so, why doesn't Wikipedia use one? Wikipedia's current wiki-per-language implementation is very frustrating to use. Have you tried it? If you switch language, you can go two clicks on and then not have a way back to the previous language at all, except by going back. Also, if some page does not exist in a language, it often isn't linked on that language's subdomain, so you probably won't know it exists in *any* language. For projects like Koha which are actually multilingual, where some things might exist in French or Spanish before English, this is bad. Popularity: if user numbers decided things, we'd all be using whatever ILSes dominate our sectors. They don't and we use Koha. Configuration problems: most MediaWiki sites have settings which are fine for wikipedia but are poor for small projects. My obvious example is the copyright and terms pages. Are you sure you can get them all? Accessibility problems: I often can't add links to wikipedia because it always wants me to pass an evil eyetest. If that is switched off, does it have any proper spam defences? Not even a wiki: compare http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TextFormattingRules http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting Bold, italics and rules are the same, but most of the rest is often wildly different and usually mediawiki gets much more complex. Mediawiki often looks better, but the cost is much ease of editing.
2.2. NAVIGATION.
Does everyone realise that most wikis can do categories, through backlinks of Category pages? See for example http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory It's not something anyone has really tried to add to wiki.koha.org yet, but it's there and ready to use if anyone wants to start linking pages to Category pages. No need to junk the wiki software, but maybe we can do better than dokuwiki. I really don't see mediawiki as a step forwards, though. Is there still time to reconsider? Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and LMS developer at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op