Fahad:
To the best of my knowledge there’s only ever been one person with a different view, which is the problem. Personally I’m not fussed what we do use and am very much open to the idea of getting something better than Mediawiki, but feel like we should only have one place where all docs are and that everyone can edit
Richard W:
the problem is the stuff I see on the existing media wiki is
- the search doesn’t work very well
- sometimes the cache gets out of whack so you only see pages if your logged on
- the syntax isn’t very easy to write
- the image upload form is archaic and difficult to use
- there’s no namepsacing leading to duplication
Discuss.
Quite a while ago I tried to make the argument for moving to dokuwiki
http://wiki.hacman.org.uk/Wiki_discussions_2015-08#Garlicbread
However there were a few different reasons why we didn’t move
The main one was who was going to support and maintain it if the move did occur
Bob seems to be the person that looks after it so I left the decision up to him and the others
The second one was I think to do with linking into the wordpress authentication (which might be one of the reasons why the existing wiki has never been updated). There was plans for the setup of ldap but I’m not sure how far that ever progressed
Another reason was that Ian didn’t like the idea of namespaces and wanted to use categories instead. I was for namespaces and wanted to keep pages grouped together that way to avoid duplication (which has already happened since the last cleanup)
Instead of moving to another wiki format it was decided instead to do a cleanup of the existing system such as fixing catagories etc
This did sort some of the problems out. But I suspect some of the problems still exist
The above link lists a load of stuff like exporting from pdf’s etc.
But the main ones I found was
- the search doesn’t work very well
- sometimes the cache gets out of whack so you only see pages if your logged on (I think Bob has to reset something when this happens)
- the syntax isn’t very easy to write (It’s the first version of wiki)
- the image upload form is a major pain in the arse to use
- there’s no namepsacing leading to duplication
As a way of getting around it I wrote most of my docs using mkdocs which is a github pages generator using python. This takes markdown and images and processes them into a page using Bootstrap
http://www.mkdocs.org/
http://hacmanchester.github.io/Tools.Shapeoko2/
Personalty I have no issue with others using mediawiki as long as I can continue to use mkdocs just because it’s so quicker and easier to write for
More recently I came across a couple of plugins for dokuwiki for anyone that’s interested that makes it look very nice. It may be possible to add bootstrap to mediawiki for info
For those not familiar with bootstrap, it’s something originally invented by twitter for the auto resizing of web content so that it’s view-able on different devices such as phones / tablets / laptops etc
The discourse site I’m writing on now I think uses it as well, it uses the concepts of spanning controls over multiple columns instead of just using resizing percetages.
The CKGEdit plugin is also a wysiwig editor plugin that allows the saving of content into wiki syntax so is also more for non technical users.
I’ve included some screengrabs below of my home setup
One question if we stick with mediawiki is can we do something like the below?
