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Waste of money. Wikimedia is still trying to support the ancient and effectively deprecated Mediawiki which is only realistically useable for corporate style de

Waste of money. Wikimedia is still trying to support the ancient and effectively deprecated Mediawiki which is only realistically useable for corporate style deployments. Individuals cannot use it well and wikimedia fails at meeting its mission statement time and time again. Donations to wikimedia are effectively donations to wikipedia, which cannot house the worlds information properly. Information craves distribution and perspectives, decentralization. I want to see proffessors and trade skill teachers create good wiki style sites, not for yet more useless projects by wikimedia designed to bolster their salaries. It'd be possible to make an absolutely free hosting site for informational wiki's (a wiki farm) for 1M that'd last a generation. But nobody really cares about that.

xyzzyz 8y ago
What exactly is the problem with MediaWiki? I for one don't believe that any problems Wikipedia currently has are of technical nature. Lots of people has contributed greatly to Wikipedia in 2000s, when MediaWiki was even less accessible than it is right now.
- davidy123 8y ago
  The formats used to store data are an incredible mess. https://github.com/spencermountain/wtf_wikipedia https://github.com/spencermountain/wtf_wikipedia has a take on it.
- devwastaken 8y ago
  Setting up MediaWiki properly yourself is not a small undertaking. How wikipedia does what they do is with puppet deployments and a significant amount of automatic server management. It's incredibly inefficient given that pages should be statically served, it's very difficult to even know what to install and it may not even be future compatible. For example getting VisualEditor, MediaWiki's custom PHP-lua extension for your version of PHP, needing PHP-FPM, managing versions of PHP, correct configs. Setting up page caching, knowing what extensions to get, seeing lots of out of date ones, having to configure them properly. Ontop of all this doing it actually right with proper file and user permissions is just completely inaccessible to anyone but those who make a job of it. Even the mediawiki 'package' is out of date and works differntly, causing more problems. It should be as simple as getting a domain, getting cloudflare, pop up a $5 VPS and a couple commands to have a proper and automatically updated install. User sets up website, sets backups to GDrive or some other cloud service, allows logins from google, facebook, whatever, and can then manage everything from the UI.
  - xyzzyz 8y ago
    Right, these are all real problems with the software, but then again, none of these is really a problem for Wikipedia itself at all. For Wikipedia, all of the problems you mention have been already solved, everything is set up and functional.
    - devwastaken 8y ago
      And that's the problem. The world's information cannot be in one place, and mediawiki is made to look like it's 'for information' when in reality it's for Wikipedia. It has intentions to be extensible but fails to follow through, and this is incredibly misleading.

xyzzyz 8y ago

What exactly is the problem with MediaWiki? I for one don't believe that any problems Wikipedia currently has are of technical nature. Lots of people has contributed greatly to Wikipedia in 2000s, when MediaWiki was even less accessible than it is right now.

davidy123 8y ago
The formats used to store data are an incredible mess. https://github.com/spencermountain/wtf_wikipedia https://github.com/spencermountain/wtf_wikipedia has a take on it.
devwastaken 8y ago
Setting up MediaWiki properly yourself is not a small undertaking. How wikipedia does what they do is with puppet deployments and a significant amount of automatic server management. It's incredibly inefficient given that pages should be statically served, it's very difficult to even know what to install and it may not even be future compatible. For example getting VisualEditor, MediaWiki's custom PHP-lua extension for your version of PHP, needing PHP-FPM, managing versions of PHP, correct configs. Setting up page caching, knowing what extensions to get, seeing lots of out of date ones, having to configure them properly. Ontop of all this doing it actually right with proper file and user permissions is just completely inaccessible to anyone but those who make a job of it. Even the mediawiki 'package' is out of date and works differntly, causing more problems. It should be as simple as getting a domain, getting cloudflare, pop up a $5 VPS and a couple commands to have a proper and automatically updated install. User sets up website, sets backups to GDrive or some other cloud service, allows logins from google, facebook, whatever, and can then manage everything from the UI.
- xyzzyz 8y ago
  Right, these are all real problems with the software, but then again, none of these is really a problem for Wikipedia itself at all. For Wikipedia, all of the problems you mention have been already solved, everything is set up and functional.
  - devwastaken 8y ago
    And that's the problem. The world's information cannot be in one place, and mediawiki is made to look like it's 'for information' when in reality it's for Wikipedia. It has intentions to be extensible but fails to follow through, and this is incredibly misleading.