Please enable wiki and issues at github

[David Nadlinger]

On Wednesday, 7 November 2012 at 07:45:19 UTC, Thomas Koch wrote:
> Do you agree?

I still think Mediawiki is the better choice than Gollum if we 
want a full-fledged wiki. As far as I can see it, a large part of 
the dissatisfaction with the current wiki is precisely that it 
doesn't support many of the convenient features people have come 
to expect from modern wiki software. But Gollum seems to support 
even less features than the prowiki.org software.

For example, Andrej mentioned above how annoying it was that the 
prowiki.org search doesn't work properly. Well, Gollum as running 
on github.com doesn't seem to support search at all!

Or take user management: MediaWiki supports an extensive set of 
tools for setting permission, banning users, protecting pages, 
etc., which is proven to work in the real world. On the other 
hand, I don't think that Gollum, due to its nature, supports any 
kind of access control besides restricting wiki access to, in our 
case, d-programming-language.org contributors. This is a problem 
because an important part of the wiki concept is that everybody 
can edit all/most of the pages, _without_ prior review. For this 
to work, you also need to be able to take measures against 
vandalism.

And for people just browsing the web for information about D, the 
fact that you can access the wiki pages as a Git repository with 
Gollum is simply not important at all (offline reading is also 
possible with MediaWiki, by the way, as commonly done with 
Wikipedia on mobile devices before the ubiquity of high-speed 
mobile internet connections).

Well, it could quite possibly be that I am biased since I have a 
non-trivial number of contributions on two language editions of 
Wikipedia, but I still think that while the GitHub wiki is nice 
for having one or two pages of documentation with a few links for 
an open source project with zero effort, if we want a full-blown 
wiki for collecting and organization information about D, 
MediaWiki would be the best bet.

It would certainly help to reduce the »awkwardness factor« of 
the current solution – after all, it is used by Wikipedia, many 
Linux distributions (Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Suse, …), KDE, 
OpenOffice, and many other open source projects. Compared to it, 
most instances of other wiki systems almost invariably feel like 
a pile of mess to me.

David