MediaWiki appropiation

This (last) week (#6) Questions, feedback, next steps?

Enric Senabre Hid... on Thu, 2011-03-10 15:07

Hi!

We ended up only a few of us active in the course, but with 8 wikis installed correctly and I think many interesting questions from all of us here in this forum. What's your opinion? Help to improve this for next scenarios, if you can...

If you're still interested in the semantic part of all this, we're probably going to be active in that conversation some more days, so just show up at the right thread :)

Another consideration: wikis have a technical side (some of which we have been seeing here these days) but also a comunicative or facilitation-related one, which is no less important!

It was out of the intention of the course, but we can discuss hare if you want about ways to engage people or invite to participation, parallel tools, information management, etc.

There's a good resource about it here: http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns

Jeff Weber

Wed, 2011-03-16 16:58

Greetings all-
A few final thoughts on MediaWiki, before I take the site down. (I'll take down http://50.17.37.223/ tomorrow, as I'm incurring a platform rental charge, and need to do more planning.)

First on MediaWiki itself. This, as it turns out, is a massive and intricate program. Prior to this class, I had no 'hands-on' experience, only knowledge of its existence. And, I must say, my use of MediaWiki's largest application, Wikipedia, was limited to single topic look-up. The program has a huge community built up, and some who devote their entire focus to this one area. After learning more of the program's capabilities, I've altered my design plans for a topic I'll discuss later.

Second, on the installation and configuration. At first these tasks seemed ominous. But a little playing around with file directories and php coding, and soon I grew more comfortable. Later extensions installed much easier than the first ones. MediaWiki concepts became more friendly, and the markup language started to make sense. As with most new software encounters, the best learning comes via 'hands-on', rather than through books. I can sense that frequent and on-going use will build even more confidence in the management/administration of this program.

Third are some comments on semantic mediawiki. This is an area I'm still trying to grasp. I can see and understand the semantic extensions, and the benefit they bring, but its the definition of semantic (as in semantic mediawiki, or semantic web) which still eludes me at times.

Finally, my use of mediawiki going forward. I'm working on a large web-based application, which until now, has a structure designed on a platform such as joomla or drupal. These platforms didn't answer all the application's needs, and I felt I could use database functionality to fill the gaps. Now, I'm leaning toward mediawiki as a base platform. A db will still be required, but not to the same extent as previously thought.

Thank you Enric for facilitating this course, and guiding us through MediaWiki. Your patience has been appreciated, and feedback well received.

Regards,
jweb

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Enric Senabre Hid...

Mon, 2011-03-21 11:42

Hi Jeff!

Thank you very much for your feedback about the course and MediaWiki itself. I agree the best way to see how MW works and get a good idea about working with extensions is doing it. That is what I tried to prompt with the course design, and will work on making it better since added to my facilitation it only worked on a relatively percentage.

Related to that large web-based application, I encourage you to keep exploring the semantic extensions as we saw a little bit here, since that can meet your demands and keep it agile at the same time.