News and Reviews > Mini-Reviews by Members
Confessions from a Wiki Hater ??!?
mouser:
i've been reading more and more about configuring mediawiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki)
one of the most well respected wiki software.
and i'm having one overriding general impression: i'm really not feeling love for it at all. in fact i'm feeling what could probably be termed strong dislike and disrespect.
the central concept of a wiki, that you have content that people can collaboratively easily edit, is one i whole heartedly endorse. but looking at the pathetic level of user control and organization of mediawiki, which people seem to think is the bees knees has left me nonplussed.
just two example from the disorganized wikimedia "manual" pages:
Revoking user's privileges
In its current development stage, MediaWiki has a web-based interface to create users and make sysops and bureaucrats, but it has no interface for revoking privileges.
Currently, the only way to downgrade user's privileges is through SQL:
update user set user_rights='' where user_name='yourusername';
Version 1.4 Mediawiki:
UPDATE user_rights SET ur_rights="" WHERE ur_user=1;
or using Program phpMyAdmin read a textfile into the "TINYBLOB" ur_rights of table user_rights that contains the proper user-entries "sysop,bureaucrat,developer"
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permissions are actually a hell of a lot worse than that, but that's just a flavor of how nonexistent any facilities for managing users are.
heres another nice example, the comparison page on the official mediawiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_content_management_systems
oops - no values for mediawiki itself... wtf?
and this is the official software for wikipedia?!? holy christ that's not good.
i spent many hours customizing the mediawiki "skin" to fit into donationcoder (www.donationcoder.com/wiki) but don't get too used to it, i think there's a very good change i may uninstall mediawiki.
it's just a total mess as far as i can see.
let me recap - i love the idea of collaborative editing of content, but for the love of god it's not that hard to imagine that you are going to need to be able to do some minimal amount of permission management, even if its just to restrict the editing of certain areas to certain groups. apparently wikis are suffering from huge amounts of spam lately and part of the problem is no one anticipated this or decided that it might be useful to have some moderation over content.. who are these people coding this stuff?
am i a wiki hater?
mouser:
i'm going to try drupal, that might match better my expectations.
[edit] drupal is suiting my tastes a lot better - i think we may use this for collaborative writing instead of wiki.
brotherS:
[edit] drupal is suiting my tastes a lot better - i think we may use this for collaborative writing instead of wiki.
-mouser (October 30, 2005, 01:05 PM)
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:o
I strongly disagree: Drupal is a "Web Content Management System" and, while it could serve as an alternative for the DC blogs, it can not replace a powerful wiki.
Also keep in mind that with millions of people experienced in editing wiki pages (wikipedia etc.) you'll attract new users willing to improve wiki pages more easily when you don't force them to learn yet another syntax/way of editing pages. This is not just my opinion, I speak from experience here.
Drupal looks like a powerful CMS, but it just can't possibly replace a real wiki IMHO.
If you want to discuss stuff with more experienced wikimedia users, I suggest the [email protected] mailing-list. To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l .
Please don't give up on mediawiki just yet.
mouser:
i noticed some wiki addon modules for drupal -
that might be a good compromise.
having played with drupal for only a couple of hours though i have to say i am very taken by it and it just feels right to me.
there are things about wiki that i really really like, but so far i can't bring myself to accept the poor support for managing users and content that i've seen so far.
if we can find nice wiki + blog + issuetracking modules for drupal it may be the ideal solution.
brotherS:
i noticed some wiki addon modules for drupal -
that might be a good compromise.
having played with drupal for only a couple of hours though i have to say i am very taken by it and it just feels right to me.
there are things about wiki that i really really like, but so far i can't bring myself to accept the poor support for managing users and content that i've seen so far.
if we can find nice wiki + blog + issuetracking modules for drupal it may be the ideal solution.
-mouser (October 30, 2005, 04:20 PM)
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Before you make any decisions: I was not able to really find out what's possible with Drupal's wiki-module. Did you stumble over a page like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page for Wikimedia, so we can compare?
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