The MediaWiki-Watch

The importance of MediaWiki

• MediaWiki is an important competitor, because it is the first choice of a lot of companies.
• MediaWiki has probably the biggest market share, not only for public, but also for enterprise wikis.
• But MediaWiki is also one of the weakest enterprise wikis, because does not support most of the essential features an enterprise wiki needs. MediaWiki-users are most likely willing to change wiki-engines. We want to show them that Foswiki is the right software to switch to.

Strengths

• Faster than Foswiki
• Everyone knows wikipedia, the primary MediaWiki instance.
• A lot of people know the MediaWiki-Wiki-code.
• Can do structured-wiki foo with the semantic mediawiki extension
• Parser functions extension and other extensions greatly enhance its functionality
• Community discussion and offline interaction is simplified due to the following features:
  • Comment associated with every edit
  • Discussion pages for every topic, including user pages
  • Watchlists
  • Convenient user interface to see a user's contributions. Can more easily find related edits and gain a sense of the user.
  • Convenient user interface to see the differences for each revision to a topic; can compare to the previous edit or to the current version. This makes it easy to catch up on what discussion has gone on while you were away.

Weaknesses

• Does not support spaces or wiki-webs. Is that possible through extensions?
• Does not support tables in an easy manner.
  • Wikipedia does support tables that, from a user's perspective, is quite easy to use.
• Does not natively support any rich-text-editing (can be changed with a Plugin, though).
• Does not support attachments, only uploads (which are less convenient).
• Though some access mechanisms are supported, does not support mechanisms that make it easier to manage restricted access to a broad set of topics, such as access control lists and groups. (Foswiki has as powerful Web- and Topic-Access-Limitation available.)
• SMW apparently doesn't have a convenient way of doing queries that is the equivalent of Foswiki nested searches - discussion here