OT: MoinMoin and Mediawiki?

[Paul Rubin]

Alexander Schremmer <2004b at usenet.alexanderweb.de> writes:
> > It doesn't have features that MW has, like user pages,
> 
> It does.

Oops, correct, however, they're not anything like MW's, which are
almost like an internal email system inside the wiki.  You can sign
any comment with ~~~ or ~~~~ and it generates a link back to your
userpage and anyone who clicks the link can leave you a message by
clicking "+" at the top of your user page or any section of it.
You're then notified automatically at the top of every page you visit,
that someone has left you a new message.

(MoinMoin also gives no apparent way to edit sections of pages, which
is a big help for editing large Wikimedia pages).

> > lists of incoming links to wiki pages,
> 
> It does.

Huh?  I don't see those.  How does it store them, that's resilient
across crashes?  Or does it just get wedged if there's a crash?

> > automatic discussion links for every wiki page, 
> 
> Can be easily obtained manually. Just include another page where
> discussion is going on. You can even protect it with different ACL
> config etc.

If you have to do it manually, that's very much reduced usability
compared to how WM does it.  With WM, the link is automatically
generated and always in the same place on the page.

> > automatic update notification for specific pages of your choice,
> 
> It does.

OK.  I didn't find this but will take your word for it.

> > support for managing image uploads and embedding them into wiki pages,
> 
> It does.

Um, how?  I see you can attach files to pages and link to them, but I
mean having version history and discussion section like regular wiki
pages etc.  All I found with MoinMoin attached files was that if you
wanted to change one, you had to delete the old one and replace it
with a new one.

> > The BogusMixedCaseLinkNames.  I'd rather have ordinary words with
> > spaces between them, like we use in ordinary writing.
> 
> Of course it does. It does not even require [[ but [" at the beginning of
> the link which might be more intuitive to the writer.

Hmm, maybe.  [[ is certainly easier to type.  It would also help to
have that navigation field on every page, where you could type the
name of a page you wanted to jump to.

> > Well, it's gotten a lot more development attention because of that
> > same Wikipedia.
> 
> Yeah, but you know: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

I don't know what the WM code is like and I can certainly believe that
it's an awful mess (in PHP even).  However it seems to me that they're
doing a good job of usability engineering on the front side, and the
page layout is much more attractive than MoinMoin's.  That's not trying
to knock MoinMoin, but Wikipedia is one of the top few hundred sites
on the web, and it's getting a LOT of attention to detail.

> > level directory, so if you have 100,000 wiki pages, the top level
> > directory has that many subdirs.  Most file systems are not built to
> > handle such large directories with any reasonable speed.
> 
> But many other are.

Best to just use a database and be done with it, than depend on magic
properties of the file system.  Or else go really berserk and replace
it with something more performance-intensive.

> > The DBMS can also handle stuff like replication automatically.
> 
> But this is non-trivial.

Well yes, of course, that's why leaving it to a DBMS is helpful.

> See above. Just because most people still work with CamelCase, they are not
> the only solution. ["Stupid mixed case page names"] is a completly valid
> link in MoinMoin and has been one for years.

Well, they should fix the defaults.  Can you set it to not automatically
convert CamelCase words into links?