User:Mihai Alexandru

=Wiki at first sight= If you’re like me, than your first encounter with a wiki was on Wikipedia, probably searching for information related to school work or things that you just found out and wanted to learn more about. That’s just the beginning, because as I was browsing the internet on different occasions, with different purposes, I remarked that almost any site about almost anything was featuring a wiki page.

The first wikiengine that I’ve got to work with was MediaWiki provided by the WikiMedia Foundation. As expected, I could find all the information related to installing and configuring a wiki on the MediaWiki wiki page. I really like the idea that you’re provided a testing solution with sandboxes for different uses (API sandbox, for example), alongside the vast information, that may help you to better understand the way things work around. I could also find support on development, about which I was pretty impressed, mainly by the idea than anyone could become a MediaWiki developer by volunteering to make the system better, but I guess that’s one of the ideas behind the wiki concept.

I can say that the passive support is great, but I believe that the active support (direct assistance from another person) could have some improvements. I like the discussion tab above any page, but what if my problem is not one hundred percent related to the topic of the most related page? As a matter of user interface, I think that the discussion tab should work alongside a generic forum interface ( by this I mean something like the phpBB or the vBulletin interface). I know that there are some IRC rooms related to support, but I think that a forum is a better way of getting the help you need as a long term solution, because others who get to experience the same problems or have the same questions as you could simply search and find yours, probably resolved or answered.

I embrace the fact that the code is mainly in php language, as it makes contributing with source code more accessible than probably it would have done being a Python written software, for example. I find the extensions principle a necessary one, coming really handy, as it allows you to modify code without changing the “core” and gives the platform a more modular feel in my opinion and so is making everything easier to personalize. One of my favorite features are skins, which can radically change the feel of the the wiki: from academic to personal, giving the user the best fitted experience.

From the beginning I considered the MediaWiki wikis as being the most related to what a wiki should look, as it practically defines it, but after going a little deep and learning about its guts, it seems to me as an even more mature and stable solution to sharing information, providing great access and flexibility for development.