User:Peak/Tiger/Why MediaWiki?

IN PROGRESS

Why MediaWiki?

• Critical mass achieved
  • continued maintenance and enhancement
  • WikiMedia Foundation

    501(c)(3)

    2005 Budget: $740K

    Jan 1 - 17 2006: $245,000 in PayPal contributions

• "Internet literacy"

  MediaWiki markup is a de facto standard

  Fosters skill in assessing Wikipedia content

Wikipedia vs TigerWeb

	Wikipedia	TigerWeb
Write access to unprotected pages	anyone*	Tigers only*
Write access to User pages	anyone*	User only or under User control
Read access	anyone	Tigers only
Sanctions for abuse	block	***
Project and Course namespaces	no	new

* unless blocked

Sophistication

Conversion Utilities

In general, HTML serves as an intermediate format: <FORMAT> ⇔ HTML ⇔ MediaWiki markup

In particular, Wiki engines produce HTML.

MS Word and similar tools can convert .doc and other formats to HTML.

There are various tools which translate to MediaWiki, e.g. html2wiki.html; see also [1]

Also, MediaWiki accepts a large subset of HTML.

PmWiki

• Sufficient for Tiger

  evidence that adopting one alternative does not lock one in irrevocably

• GPL license

Main advantages

"PmWiki permits users to establish password protection for individual pages or groups of pages, for example to establish defined zones for collaborative work by certain groups, such as in a company intranet.

"Password protection can be applied to reading, editing, uploading to and changing passwords for the restricted zone. Through the use of custom scripts (below), it is possible to integrate password protection into .htpasswd."

Many extensions are available

• maybe too many (400+)
• reflects "keep core minimal" philosophy

UTF-8 encoding is possible.

Main drawbacks

• No database (but page locking is managed by PmWiki)
• No "PmWiki Foundation"
• "work in progress"

  limited support for tables (cannot fall back to HTML)

  no distinction between "Go" and "Search"

  documentation is not "industrial-strength" (e.g. rules for naming pages and uploads)

  inability to turn off inlining of external images [apparently]

  dead links look like live links

• "non-standard markup"
• etc