[cgiapp] Future of the wiki

[Mark Stosberg]

On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:06:16 -0500
David Kaufman <david at gigawatt.com> wrote:

> Hi Gurunandan,
> 
> Gurunandan R. Bhat wrote:
> > I had offered Mark to port content on the wiki to Movable Type a few 
> > months earlier. At that time, Mark had very valid concerns - that MT
> > does not offer key features required of a wiki. But that was MT4 and
> > a re-evaluation of MT after the release of MT5 recently might be
> > interesting.
> 
> 
> I like MT (2 or 3 years ago) but am not familiar with recent versions -- 
> can it be used like a Wiki?  I thought it was strictly blog software.

Probably the strongest case for-or-against this idea is the fact that
Movable Type appears to be using MediaWiki for their own wiki, instead
of something based Movable Type.

Movable Type has a number of features to support wiki-like work, but it
is not designed to be a wiki and would likely require some significant
modification to work this way. In it's favor:

 - It's easy to install
 - It has a beautiful UI, both on the public and admin sides
 - It has basic "revisions" support built-in
 - It supports many authentication methods 
 - It supports "Markdown" syntax for posts.

Someone else mentioned having a shared authentication system that could
be used both the mailing list and the wiki. That could be nice, but
gets us into looking at a category of software that's more like "Google
Groups", which supports the list/forum concept as well as a wiki.

Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be
nice.

    Mark