Possible uses of MediaWiki

Wiki's can be used a lot of different ways. MediaWiki is primarily designed for http://www.wikipedia.org, and is well suited for that task. Mediawiki has some of the best features, and some very glaring omissions (for certain applications) However, Mediawiki is actively being developed, and it is open source, so it could be possible to add features.

The following is a list of possible wiki uses, and how well mediawiki is suited for those tasks, and links to how to set mediawiki up for that task.

Encyclopedia

 * Mediawiki rocks for small documents, with manually sorted categories, and a large userbase.... just see http://www.wikipedia.com for that
 * it appears to support templates for certain categories!

Wikipedia could use

 * or at least more articles in wikipedia, could cite their sources, use formal references, say, to a history book, or scroll, or magazine article, or study, or letter, or journal

Rapid Document Prototyping

 * Backlinks (multiple categories basically deal with this)

Web Log (Bloging)

 * access control

Attributes

 * a newline is a newline by default
 * access control lists
 * connection to subversion/version control software
 * connection to bugzilla or similar
 * document includes (write a procedure once, use many places)
 * fall over to language that documentation is written in if it isn't there yet
 * verbosity clappsing (show an outline, show basic reasoning, give wordy wastefull stuff that authors like to write (see gentoo's docuementation, it's nearly impossible to follow)
 * cascading ... (have one document be based on another live document, so that when the base document changes, it changes in child documents)
 * code highlighting

project to implement this stuff
(note, the fractodendron project --> http://escargot.icehouse.net/mediawiki/index.php/fractodendron is hoping to find / document / implement these features in a wiki.. as well as p2p wiki stuff..)

Attributes

 * clear reporter identification

Required Components
(I don't think I'm crazy for mentioning this possibility)
 * Access Control Lists
 * Item widgets
 * shopping cart widget
 * ssl

Attributes

 * easy to navigate
 * easy to search
 * links to related articles
 * links to similar topics
 * categories
 * backlinks for missing pages

Example sites

 * http://wiki.linuxquestions.org
 * http://meta.wikipedia.org (this site!)