[devwastaken]

The community of wikimedia and wikipedia is pretty bad with this. I've seen articles locked, then marked for deletion, so you can't add more information to make it 'article-worthy'. They then say that its not 'against the guidelines', as the ultimate excuse.

Mediawiki is supposed to also be a communicative platform on these problems, but it really fails its goal there with its talk pages, when these problems really stem from a lack of centralized community and being able to easily talk about and resolve these issues. Typically, you'l get referenced to IRC or another talk page, where your issue will not be resolved and will probably take forever to be responded to.

Overall, I've ditched working with Mediawiki or anything wikimedia. They don't show caring to actually invest in open platforms and software that others can use, they're just interested in making their own projects popular. Some of the core devs are actually really good at what they do, the problem is that the framework now needs a big revamp for it to be usable outside of the wikipedia environment properly, something wikimedia will not invest in.

If they want to show good faith in freedom of information, they would make their software into components and allow other projects to use them, especially the actual wiki markup processor. This would allow people to integrate wiki functionality into fundamentally better frameworks to maintain, like Drupal 8, or design their own frameworks that internally use the packages maintained in mediawiki.

[tptacek]

You say they're "bad" at this, but another word you could use is "consistent", and you could follow that up by suggesting that there's a coherent criteria used for what's deleted, but that nerds have a really hard time understanding it.

To wit: Wikipedia not at all concerned about storage space, but they are concerned very much about the amount of time they'll need to spend policing articles to make sure that things that wind up preferentially at the top of Google search result pages aren't full of advertising spam, lies, and cruft. Every article they add increases that burden. A reasonable line to draw in the sand is "we're only going to allow articles that make a clear statement of why their topic is notable, and for which an ordinary, disinterested editor could verify all the facts by following cited sources."

[mynewtb]

> things that wind up preferentially at the top of Google search result pages

I feel that this really should not be the worry of Wikipedia.

[tptacek]

Well, it very much is.

[vacri]

> They don't show caring to actually invest in open platforms and software that others can use

You mean apart from Wikipedia and Mediawiki?

[devwastaken]

Mediawiki is made for Wikipedia, it is not software that can be well used outside of the environment. I know, because I've invested a lot of time into trying to make it so educators and communities could start their own wiki's, and what I've found is that its way too complex to expect anyone other than a sysadmin to maintain, and way too hard for users to learn wiki markup and extensions to use it in any decent way in templates. Add ontop the amount of work you need to do to just get Lua (An actual .php extension), Visual editor (Giant node.js project), or the math extension (another big node.js project) in, and you're looking at a massive amount of work that could break at any time. This is because its direction is not for individual installs, it is meant to be in an environment of sysadmins, consistent maintenance, and those who develop the framework.

Wikipedia is also not that 'open'. What you edit has to fit specific guidelines, and of course get past the moderators to be approved. It also misses the point of freedom of information, because there's tons of info out there that people want to put out, but doesn't fit the scheme of Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia visions is: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.", and thats what I'm criticizing Wikimedia and its projects for not upholding.

[vacri]

> What you edit has to fit specific guidelines

If you want truly open communication, go to 4chan. It's a cesspool, which is fine for people that like that, but it's much further away from being 'information for everyone'. Claiming that WP isn't open because they want a basic level of quality is just grinding an axe - WP has informed a far greater number of humans to a far higher level of quality than all the ^chans put together.

> I know, because I've invested a lot of time into trying to make it so educators and communities could start their own wiki's

And yet MediaWiki is sprayed in wikis all over the internet. I've set it up as well. Yes, learning the full markup isn't trivial, but the basic stuff is. And I'm not sure how it's "not open" simply because it has a learning curve. Does this mean Vim is not open? Emacs? Apache? OpenBSD? The Vim GUI sucks, because it's outside it's expected environment of a terminal - does that also mean it's "not open"?

If you want an example of open software that is designed specifically 'for the punters', look at Gnome 3... where you're pretty locked down and can't do much (cue complaints then about 'freedom'), but there's no learning curve. LibreOffice is made for general consumption and still gets complaints about being difficult to use from the punters - and even then, if you want to use the more advanced features, there's a learning curve.

Complex software has a learning curve, and hiding that learning curve is really difficult. Apple 'solved' this by simply removing functionality and configurability (again, cue complaints about losing freedom). If Apple made a wiki, you wouldn't even have the choice of adding that maths plugin. Hell, you probably wouldn't even be able to skin it.

> it is meant to be in an environment of sysadmins

It's a heavyweight engine that you're wanting to put lots of heavyweight stuff on. That's what they're designing for, and it has some warts, but it works. It's daft to complain that the engine primarily written by a non-profit for one of the top 5 websites isn't written as a one-click install feather-light application.

Basically you're holding WP to an impossible standard and complaining that they don't measure up.

[devwastaken]

>If you want truly open communication, go to 4chan.

Its not about open communications, its the fact that information has to fit the criteria Wikipedia deems necessary, and that does not fit a lot of information out there. For example, a group of proffessionals in building design want to create an educational site on how to get started digitally, what software, the theories and factors in play when creating a building, fueled by their real-life experience and education over time. That is not something you can put on Wikipedia. You can put some of the theory, but ultimately experience is lost in translation or deleted due to no sources.

>Claiming that WP isn't open because they want a basic level of quality is just grinding an axe

Its not open in anywhere near what their vision states. Its open for sourced information and whatever various mods will allow. Which, is fine if thats how they want it to be, but to claim its an open platform for information is false.

>WP has informed a far greater number of humans to a far higher level of quality than all the ^chans put together.

I am not advocating that Wikipedia just be an open book to write whatever you want, but that its platform does not support much outside of sourced info, which is a category of information, not the sum of all information, and leaves out a lot of other information that doesn't fit its guidelines.

>Yes, learning the full markup isn't trivial, but the basic stuff is. And I'm not sure how it's "not open" simply because it has a learning curve.

Making a wiki has very little to do with the basic markup, and a lot more to do with designing templates and organizing how your data is formatted and presented, and that is what mediawiki fails to do in a manner that is accessible. Difficulty does reduce accessibility, which infact does reduce its openness. If it were simpler and well documented, searchable, then there would be a lot more writers. A lot of the problems can be solved by having a markup language that also acts like a programming language, being able to work with variables and inputs and do transforms on them, much like an actual templating language.

The learning curve of Libreoffice or other programs of that nature is a false equivalence. Adding a graph in Libreoffice takes a few clicks of the dropdowns, maybe a few tries of adding in info. Adding in a graph into mediawiki requires you to find an extension, install that, learn its syntax, and god forbid you add it into a template dynamically, learn how to get data variables from wiki markup. It is significantly more work and understanding of tech.

>Complex software has a learning curve, and hiding that learning curve is really difficult.

Yes, it is, but it is possible, if the software were designed for being used outside of the wikipedia environment more, similiar to frameworks like Drupal 8 or Wordpress are, it would be much more maintainable and learnable. Understand that wikitext is just a small small part of a mediawiki environment, and even thats enough to bar entry for many people.

>It's a heavyweight engine that you're wanting to put lots of heavyweight stuff on. That's what they're designing for, and it has some warts, but it works.

Its an old engine that is very integrated into itself with a lot of tech debt that hasn't been paid back. They are designing for that, not for creating a framework that best suits accessible, editable, presentable information.

>It's daft to complain that the engine primarily written by a non-profit for one of the top 5 websites isn't written as a one-click install feather-light application. Wikimedia does not claim the Mediawiki is made for WP and shouldn't be used outside of it. I claim that, but thats not how it should be.

An application being 'heavy' has nothing to do with its maintainability or usability to the end user. Arguably, Wordpress is much heavier, yet has a built-in auto updater, plugins and theme installer, and is quite easy to setup.

>Basically you're holding WP to an impossible standard and complaining that they don't measure up.

I'm holding /Wikimedia/ to the standard they've set for themselves, with expectations much lower than that, and still it doesn't hold up, because they are not actually doing what their vision is, they're just making their own product where information has to fit their guidelines. You can argue that Wikimedia is a non-profit, or the software is complex, or whatever you'd like, but the reality is that there is a significant amount of information that will never be passed into the internet space because good platforms for it don't exist yet.