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 natively support any rich-text-editing (can be changed with a Plugin, though).
• Does not support spaces or wiki-webs. Is that possible through extensions?
• Extension installation in Mediawiki is rather painful. Thanks to Composer, since 2013 you can do that from command line (instead of unpack compressed file). You can also install Extensions collections via selected Debian packages. In Foswiki you can search and install extensions directly from the configuration web page (bin/configure).

Mediawiki and Foswiki extensions installation comparison.

• There is no button for creating new page in Mediawiki.
• 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 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