User:Harry Wood

I am an avid user of wikis, and I am a wiki-wonderer visiting many different wiki communities (a GluePerson perhaps), and I am keen to promote the use of wikis for new internet communities, and also for corporate intranet use

I have an understanding of the technology behind wikis. I haven't looked into the mediawiki codebase in much detail, but mediawiki is undoubtedly one of the best wiki engines (particularly from a useability perspective).

There are still ways it can improve:

To help people establish a new wiki community (The Seed posting phase of the wiki lifecycle), I think mediawiki should come with some built-in basic user manual pages, and other meta information. Happily I see someone started this process, and I've tried galvanise this into -a 'project' over at Public Domain Help Pages.

I've encountered a lot of wiki spam during my wanderings. I think there are some big improvements to be made in terms of anti-spam features, particularly to protect small wikis; Those wikis which do not have a very active community. It's a difficult problem to tackle, but some more innovation in this area is much needed, to help out those smaller wikis, and to generally reduce the success rate of spammers.