Yesterday I mailed a lot of Wiki engine developers about adding their engines to the Matrix. I already got some feedback and one question that was asked by some people was: why not use an open aproach instead of the need to register to edit records?

I'd like to answer that here instead in FAQ to let people comment on this topic.

WikiMatrix evolved from a page in my wiki at http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:compare - so I know what people are talking about ;-) The wiki page was intended to make it simple to compare DokuWiki with a few other Wiki engines available, but it grew and became quite popular. But with the size it did show some defficiencies in the way of handling such a large comparison table in a wiki: It was not filterable, it was hard to edit and some parts became outdated or incorrect (nobody fixed that for the first two reasons).

The idea to create wikimatrix was born in a comment on the wiki page. So the question stays: why can't anyone edit records on wikimatrix? Again two reasons: a feature list tends to be more current and correct when maintained by a dedicated person. Secondly programming the matrix system we use here would have been much harder if we had to add some kind of history for each record which would be needed to avoid vandalism.

It is possible that we will go this way some day (adding a history and open the access) but for now this is how it works.

BTW: The same people argueing about wikimatrix not being open enough seem to have no problem in registering at freshmeat for listing their engines there ;-) Just look at WikiMatrix as a freshmeat for Wikis.