[Koha] wiki.koha-community.org

[Thomas Dukleth]

Rely inline:


On Thu, April 15, 2010 10:20, MJ Ray wrote:
> 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. [...]
>


1.  AVAILABLE TIME.

> Oops! I've even lacked sufficient time to read this email until now!

I have mostly not had sufficient time to attend to the mailing list
recently myself.

[I have been collaborating with another programmer on a sadly non-library
related project which must be finished before I turn into a pumpkin.  When
the person with whom I have been collaborating has disappeared for a few
days at a time, then I have had some time for Koha.  Finishing the project
which is keeping me from Koha is a better time availability remedy for me
but that remedy has not been solely dependent upon me.]

I should have some more time for the wiki next week.


2.  CONCISE EXPRESSIONS.

> Is it proper reasoning if it can't be expressed concisely? ;-)

My personal preference is to show reasons, evidence which underlies
reasons, and relevant background to enable people to have an opportunity
to properly understand the strength or mistakes of my reasoning and offer
their own alternatives with common points of reference.  There are some
irreducible complexities in the world which deserve due consideration.  I
always try to avoid easily formed oversimplification.  However, I am
mindful of the helpful preference for concise expression.  I often lack
the time to prepare work which is both thorough and concise.

In the present case, I think that my effort has not progressed quite far
enough for me to be both concise and informative.  I should be able to
give a concise expression of reasons at a later point.

I do not seek obfuscation by trying to give detailed information for those
who care to read at length.  Lack of concisely expressed reasoning should
not be presumed to be the same as reasoning which could not be expressed
concisely.

When I have had the time to test an implementation sufficiently, then I
should also have time to express my reasoning concisely.  I have only
advocated testing the utility of MediaWiki but not formed a necessary
conclusion over a test which has not yet been sufficiently configured and
conducted.


3.  WIKI CONTENT RELICENSING.

>
> I'm happy to see that the content licensing might be solved as a
> consequence

PTFS now controls the uncast LibLime vote for relicensing some significant
wiki content.  I am still hopeful that PTFS will express themselves
favourably on such a minor issue to avoid the need to rewrite some helpful
content contributed by LibLime which would be well worth transferring to
any new wiki.


4.  WIKI FARMING.

> and that people are willing to work on farming the wiki,

I am willing to put much work into a wiki in whatever form people agree
the wiki should take.  Perhaps the reference is to coordinated wiki farms
or families which are used by the Mediawiki foundation for multilingual
wikis, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family .


5.  WIKI CHOICE.

> but I don't believe that mediawiki is the best (or even a good) solution.

I gave some reasons in my previous message about why I think that
MediaWiki is a good choice relative to various problems which I found in
my extensive experience working with DokuWiki,
http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-wiki.koha-community.org-p27860816.html .  One
of my most significant findings is that plugins which help resolve
problems that I have found with DokuWiki resolve those problems by making
DokuWiki more like MediaWiki.


5.1.  EXERCISING CHOICE.

>
> To be clear, I am disappointed with the preselection of mediawiki

I only just now noticed that the subdomain wiki.koha-community.org
resolves to something.  Thankfully the link from koha-community.org does
not point to the new subdomain.  I have never advocated preselecting a new
wiki.  In my previous message, I had advocated setting up a test
installation of MediaWiki.  I had presumed that after a test would be
fully configured and available for testing for a period of time, we could
then vote on whether such an installation would be a good choice for the
Koha community.

Galen Charleton identified the fact that [aside from the criticism of the
'heaviness' of MediaWiki implementations given by Frédéric Demain] no one
had raised an objection to using MediaWiki.  Obviously, you have now and
any serious objection deserves serious consideration by everyone
interested.  I had raised the issue with Galen that we should have a
formal vote after a suitable test.

Galen suggested to me selecting according to what wiki would actually be
used in practise.  People would vote with their use.  I find Galen's
suggestion of voting according to use appealing, although, I had not
properly considered some possible issues of fairness in how the
alternatives are presented if MediaWiki would be the only new alternative
and the old Koha wiki would be the only DokuWiki alternative presented. 
Galen's suggestion has certainly provided me with the motivation to
resolve implementation issues more quickly than I might have otherwise
given my constraint of time from other work.

I have been working on issues which needed to be addressed for the
MediaWiki installation hosted by Equinox.  Galen has done a good job of
starting that installation with daily database dumps and version control
in Git for any modifications of the scripts but a few important initial
configuration issues have been missed.

The MediaWiki database needs to be dropped and reinstalled with the
MediaWiki in a slightly different directory within the home directory for
the wiki to avoid the namespace collision currently preventing the use of
cool short URLs familiar to users of Wikimedia foundation installations of
MediaWiki such as Wikipedia,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL .  There may be a way of
correcting the issue without dropping the database but especially without
any significant content yet dropping the database would be the easiest
remedy.

I think that wiki.koha-community.org should merely direct users to an
appropriately localised wiki similar to what is done from
http://www.wikipedia.org .  A simple change in DNS and Apache
configuration could provide for language specific subdomains.


5.2.  REASONS INVOKING POPULARITY.

> apparently mainly on grounds of popularity (which is repeated to argue
> for everything from translations to scalability),

My appeal to popularity in the reasons which I gave favouring MediaWiki in
my recent previous message merely identified the high demand from users
and that the large MediaWiki development community which followed from the
popularity.  Those two consequences of popularity should help to ensure
that MediaWiki would continue to be an especially scalable and featureful
wiki into the future.  I never favour popularity for its own sake and
usually favour choices which are only popular with the well informed
minority and not the public at large.

I merely want a wiki implementation for Koha is best suited to growing
with the growth of Koha and the growing diversity of the community.


5.3.  ADMINISTRATIVE AND ACCESSIBILTY ISSUES.

> while ignoring its
> many configuration and accessibility problems

Administering MediaWiki has a much heavier administrative burden than
administering DokuWiki.  I am willing to take the time to learn and
implement the most helpful techniques, extensions, and bots to use for
both easing the administrative burden and enabling the features which
would make the greater effort required worthwhile.  Did you mean to refer
to anything else, aside from administrative complexity, in terms of
configuration problems?

We do not need to implement captcha images which lack an audio alternative
in MediaWiki.  Obviously, the fact that no one has written the code for an
audio alternative for the MediaWiki captcha extension is unfortunate but
we can avoid the problem altogether.

Do you know of any other accessibility issues for MediaWiki and are they
any worse than accessibility problems of DokuWiki?  Serious attention
seems to be given to accessibility for MediaWiki,
http://blind.wikia.com/wiki/Mediawiki_and_Accessibility .  Guidelines have
been written for maintaining good accessibility for Wikipedia articles,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Accessibility

Historically I have had problems with JavaScript in both MediaWiki and
DokuWiki but I have not had such problems in the past couple of years.


5.4.  WIKI DEFINITION.

> and that it arguably is
> not even a wiki.

How is MediaWiki not a wiki?  Do you mean that MediaWiki does not support
camel case links without an extension?

Camel case wiki links can be activated in MediaWiki if we need them.  I do
not find it helpful that referring to BibLibre, BnF, ByWater, ePUB, or
LibLime in DokuWiki produces perhaps unintended wiki links automatically
but not the use of other names not containing Camel case.  Camel case wiki
links can be turned off in DokuWiki.  People should express their
preference for or against camel case.

I presume that a design providing for collaboration in creating and
editing content and a simple markup syntax relative to HTML would be
criteria for identifying a wiki.

The first wiki created does not seem to have the one and only canonical
syntax which may be good for the development of wikis.  Perhaps there
should be a W3C standard for wiki syntax but I do not know of any effort
to create a truly common standard amongst wikis.

>
>
> I'm not going to Fisk the whole essay, but I'll comment on a few:
>


5.5.  MULTILINGUAL IMPLEMENTATION.

> 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.

We can have persistent navigation links in addition to page content
specific links in a MediaWiki implementation.

I have created a DNS configuration file which maps every language listed
at http://translate.koha.org/ to a language specific subdomain using the
familiar two letter ISO 639-1 language code where available and the less
familiar three letter ISO 639-2 code where no two letter code is
available.  I have interpolated a code with a hyphen for some language
dialects or other variants which may need separate localisation for
linguistic or cultural reasons and for which no ISO 639-2 code exists.

Configuring a MediaWiki family well is a little tricky and I prefer to
leave English as the only wiki until I have had time to test an
implementation on my own server to have confidence that my first attempted
multilingual implementation will not break MediaWiki on the Equinox
server.

I have been studying the Wikimedia Foundation configuration files,
http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/ , not to slavishly copy them but to learn
who they are used to manage such large wikis.

> 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.

Searching can be configured to function globally for all MediaWiki wikis
in a wiki family which would consequently work across different languages.

> For projects like Koha which are actually
> multilingual, where some things might exist in French or Spanish
> before English, this is bad.

We should encourage users to create at least an empty page in the English
wiki for any content which they are creating in a localised wiki alone.  A
bot might be used to correct the problem.

Much MediaWiki administration is accomplished using bots.  I created a
page at mediawiki.org correcting for some deficiency in identifying
helpful bots, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_bots .


5.6.  REVIEW OF REASONING ISSUES.

>
>
> Popularity: if user numbers decided things, we'd all be using whatever
> ILSes dominate our sectors.  They don't and we use Koha.

I agree that mere general popularity should not govern individual choice. 
Where collaboration is required for a wiki to serve its intended purpose
and we cannot switch wikis with a simple system preference, then we need
to take a choice as a community.  After we have been able to run a
suitable test, then we should be able to have a vote.  I like Galen's idea
of voting by use over time but I have some concern that a comparison may
not be sufficiently fair without multiple competing community
implementations.

>
> 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?

There are many extensions which provide spam protection in MediaWiki.  We
should not use an extension which causes accessibility problems. 
MediaWiki installations are reported to be  popular spam targets, however,
without having the popularity of Wikimedia foundation sites such as
Wikipedia, the Koha community should not need to use spam defences which
are not implemented reasonably.

We once solved spam problems on the Koha wiki by simply imposing an
htaccess password form with the password embedded in the form information
label for easy entry by humans.  Spam problems later subsided as a
consequence and we later removed the htaccess form without adverse
consequence.

>
> 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.

People are not required to use the full expressive complexity of a
particular syntax.  However, I recognise that inconsistencies in MediaWiki
syntax for links are unfortunate.  Every syntax has some oddities which
are a point of difficulty.  DokuWiki syntax for namespace creation is a
difficulty in DokuWiki.

Here is a point where popularity ought to matter because MediaWiki syntax
is most familiar to the largest numbers of people.  Spanish is simpler and
easier to use than English but English is understood by more people in
common and thus more suitable as a global common communication language.

I note in that reference that the advantage which DokuWiki once had over a
syntax issue which is of importance to me is now an advantage for
MediaWiki.  DokuWiki provides for 5 levels of section headings while
MediaWiki now provides for 6.  As I had stated in my previous message I
may be the only one who has created content in the Koha wiki which used 5
levels of section headings.

New feature elements for reducing complexity in editing the most complex
content on MediaWiki pages have been announced for implementation on
Wikimedia Foundation sites such as Wikipedia from the development branch
of MediaWiki.  I suspect that it would take several months before such new
features for reducing the complexity in complex content to be included in
a stable release of MediaWiki.

[...]

> Does everyone realise that most wikis can do categories, through
> backlinks of Category pages?
>
> See for example http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory

Every wiki certainly has some means for creating categories.  The issue
which I treated at length in my previous message is the range of features
which help the user make use of categories to find content.  Please see my
previous message for that discussion,
http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-wiki.koha-community.org-p27860816.html .

>
> 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.

As I have documented in my previous post their are means of implementing
categories in DokuWiki particularly with some plugins.  However, the
support for the use of categories in MediaWiki particularly with a larger
set of extensions seems much better to me for serving the purpose of
enabling users to find relevant content.


6.  TAKING DECISIONS.

>  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?

Firstly, no decision has clearly been taken other than the start of a
mostly yet unconfigured MediaWiki implementation provided by Equinox.  I
identified a problem for URLs further above for which we should drop the
database and start again in a new subdirectory on the file system before
anyone adds any significant content.

My significant experience with DokuWiki and what I have learnt from
studying MediaWiki persuades me that DokuWiki is only the second best
choice.  However, I suspend a proper conclusion until concluding proper
testing.  I have investigated other options but we should all be open to
good suggestions.

Do you object to testing in use as Galen had suggested?  I am willing to
spend the time to move any content created in a wiki implementation tested
in use to whatever wiki implementation the community would choose.

We should always have time to reconsider any decision once a decision once
a decision would actually be taken.

[...]


Thomas Dukleth
Agogme
109 E 9th Street, 3D
New York, NY  10003
USA
http://www.agogme.com
+1 212-674-3783