So far the journey of wiki has been very pleasant to me. I liked the wiki concept and technology it focuses. Mediawiki comes with lots of features and extensions which are really cool. But still i feel that there should be some very good features included in future MediaWiki. Here are my few thoughts:
1. More security options, such as section based protection. currently mediawiki have the option to protect a page not a section. we know in multi user environment many people can contribute their part in a single article. there might be the necessity to protect individual contribution rather than the complete page.
2. The wiki editor can be enhanced little bit to add few more options to make life bit easier. It is not right to expect an end user will know the complete wiki syntax to use it appropriately. May be a WYSIWYG in wiki mode will be good choice.
3. Article save and publish option. currently wiki does not have the ability to save an incomplete article. this option will really help the writers to write articles and publish them once its complete. It will be also nice to have an auto draft options for articles. so that nothing is lost accidentally.
4. an integrated comments system for the article. it can be kept as an option in the article edit section and will be shown in the view of the article page.
5. last but not least , more of a web 2.0 featured. it will be really cool to load contents dynamically using AJAX and give it a look and feel of a web 2.0 site.
Hi Mizan,
If I understood correctly the wish under 1 (section protection) is really already possible. We have it at work, with some features on who can edit). I will check it out and come back to you later next week.
Best regard,
Marcel
hi Marcel
It will be really nice to look at your example. what i found so far in MediaWiki, we cant actually protect any particular section. if you click the edit link of a section and in that edit page you click protect link at the top, it actually protect the whole page not the particular section. What i am looking for user based protection not even user group based protection. Like i have an section which only me and Sysop can change no one else. So let me know about the solution you have for it.
i found one solution where they implemented it by hacking the code.
http://www.thejackol.com/2007/02/16/disable-anonymous-editing-in-mediawiki/
but its not in build in MediaWiki. We can hack lots of things but there are few things those should be included within the software. 😉
thanks
Mizan
Hi Mizan,
At work we use: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PageProtection
I have not much experience with it but “the guys” seem comfortable with it.
Hope it helps.
Best regards,
Marcel
Hi Marcel
Thanks for the information. As i told you those are extensions build by developers and this particular extension is a good one that we can look for. my point was to have this functionality build in with MediaWiki. MediaWiki have page protection functionality and they can enhance that to perform more protection option here.
thanks for your post and also participating in the discussion
regards
Mizan
Hi there
1) Section protection is not possible, because sections are not a structural concept represented in the database. However, you can compose a page by including other pages into it (any page can be used as a template) – you can then protect the individual pages.
2) WYSIWYG is conceptually the wrong choice for wikis – there are too many things that can not be represented visually (like template inclusion, categories, etc). There is also the technical problem that most (if not all) in-browser rich-text editors are really edit HTML/DOM – which is not powerful enough to express MediaWiki markup (again, templates, magic words, etc).
However, it would be nice to make things easier for users – for example using the WYSIWYM concept (what you see is what you mean). WikEd seems a good start: it has syntax highlighting and could probably be enhanced to include some more what-you-get formating. For this and more, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
3) The usual solution to this is to save drafts as a subpage of your user page, or into some other special place, where it will not be included in searches, etc, per default. Using something like http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lockdown, you can also hide namespaces from anonymous visitors – so you could make a “Drafts:” namespace. Lockdown is active on my website.
4) Using http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TalkHere, you can (ab)use the talk page as an easy to use comment system for articles. It’s also active on my site
5) Some more AJAX stuff would be nice, though I personally would be even more interested in XSLT based page delivery – see http://brightbyte.de/page/Client-side_skins_with_XSLT for some ranting about this.
Regards,
Daniel
hi Daniel
thanks for sharing your thoughts on the issue. i really liked your ideas and also agree with you on the notes. i know there are lots of extensions and hacks available for mediawiki and one problem i found is that some hacks or extensions do not work properly as version changes. they are too much version specific. so if something is build in with the software rather than adding any third party extension, that would have been nice.
thanks for sharing your knowledge and i believe we will be doing that in future too.
best regards
Mizan
Hallo!
I dont know where to ask, i just searched google. I have installed mediawiki and i have some questions really about it. It is nice to have the right protect all pages from anonymos users read it, but i want just to protect one page, and it is a liitle stupid to protect all, and than allow to see all other without that one. I searched for solutions and installed patch, with allow only administrator or current user to see a tex written in
{{ #ifeq: {{CURRENTUSER}} | user | }}
it seemed to me really nice, but again, i protect current page from editing, but it show source on the page. so that text wich i was hidden is still seen for everyone.
please maybe you have some advise or you know where i can ask for it or help.
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