[Koha] wiki.koha-community.org

[MJ Ray]

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