Wednesday 17 December 2008

You can bank on it, together you do not need to invest as much

The Stanton project for MediaWiki usability will start in a few weeks. This does not mean that nothing is happening. Today I learned that a bank has spend considerable effort in introducing the UNICEF extensions. One of their programmers has spend considerable effort to improve the software. I have been told that much of this has been fed back to UNICEF. As the programmer is leaving the bank, I was happy to learn that he is allowed to take with him all the code involved.

This programmer does so far not have SVN commit rights. I learned that he is going to work for another company.. Another company interested in implementing the UNICEF extensions.

What this proves to me, is the need for collaboration between all these organisations that develop MediaWiki. It is more effective to work together. Better results can be achieved for the same costs when coordination becomes a priority..

I had a word with Erik.. He told me that MediaWiki already has something like the CreatePage extension in core. It is part of a search result...

What else happens when you click on Uniwiki or what else happens when you click on Create Page..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Uniwiki extensions

This week I finished testing the Uniwiki extensions. Some of the ideas that they promote are quite interesting and definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.

I run a wiki with my Dad and many of the users are quite unfamiliar with the wikitext structure. The Uniwiki Generic Edit Page extension, for example, would definitely help to make the MediaWiki environment friendlier towards them. Even if it is only a small part of the page, removing heading and category tags causes the environment to be so much easier to use; as an experienced editor even I would be likely to opt for using it on my wikis.

There are a few bugs that need working on in a couple of the Uniwiki extensions, but seeing some of them rolled out to Wikimedia wikis would be even nicer and help those 80% of smaller wikis that don’t have as much contribution as we’d like.