Difference between revisions of "Fab Lab Wiki - by NMÍ Kvikan:Concept"

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(New page: Here's the problem. GIT is great, but it's complex and it doesn't promote maintainability. Wiki's are in popular use, most people who've been on the Internet has at least seen one, and Med...)
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Revision as of 18:41, 13 July 2008

Here's the problem. GIT is great, but it's complex and it doesn't promote maintainability. Wiki's are in popular use, most people who've been on the Internet has at least seen one, and Mediawiki in particular is a very good piece of software.

The downside is that Mediawiki, and all other Wiki software, is centralized and requires a web server to operate.

Centralization

Fab Labs are inherently decentralized, that's the way we like it, and that's the way it should be. Because of this, GIT is a brilliant idea, and monolithic centralized concepts such as Mediawiki are poison.

But despite this, Mediawiki is still a very very good piece of software. I've brought up the centralization issue with one of the MediaWiki lead developers and there is some thought going into figuring it out how to make Mediawiki run in a decentralized manner. I'm not sure when this is going to become a reality, as database distribution isn't vital to Wikipedia's function, and any changes made to Mediawiki must be in Wikipedia's interest first and foremost.

Web server

Having to run Mediawiki off a webserver sucks. Having a database running isn't all that bad, but having to use both a browser and a web server really sucks. It would be easier to offer a console program that formats the database content, but it's almost impossible because Mediawiki's code format isn't well defined and it's far from easy to parse. There are people working on fixing this.