another thing i don't like on mediawiki:
it does not come with a list of all pages or at least all namespaces in the default instalation.

If you go into Special:Search, under the thing that says "search in namespaces", you'll find a list of every namespace on the wiki. By default, the namespaces are:
(Main), Talk, User, User talk, Image, Image talk, Template, Template talk, MediaWiki, MediaWiki talk, Project, Project talk, Help, Help talk, Category, and Category talk.

The most important thing to keep in mind when considering MediaWiki is that it was designed for  Wikipedia and that the core development is centered around that web site. Wikipedia is all about sharing knowledge, which means open access and a flat file structure. As far as corporate branding goes that is real easy and if you do a "mediawiki templates" search on Google you'll find a large selection of templates.

Installation

MediaWiki is one of the easiest wiki installs you'll find. No root access required, simply FTP your files to your server and browse to the web install page. No need to even setup a database, the install script does it for you if you use your superuser/root password or you can setup a database and user first in your web control panel first (nothing hacker level about that). Unlike Dokuwiki, which is probably the quickest and easiest of all here to setup and use, MediaWiki does not have an admin control panel. MW has a configuration file that you access via ftp and make changes to. It's really very simple and the documentation is excellent.

Upgrades

Upgrades have been very easy and they come on a regular basis because the script is constantly being improved for Wikipedia. Usually it only involves saving your LocalSettings file and uploading the new files, if there has been a change to the database you simply run the install script again.

Table of contents and categories

There's also nothing to "codify" when adding a table of contents to an article in MW, that's done automatic and if you want to hide the table of contents it's as simple as adding "no_toc" anywhere on the page. Adding a page to a category, so that it will appear in that category's list of articles, is just as easy and you can easily add an article to multiple categories. There are also some nifty extensions for displaying your list of categories.

Extensions/Plugins

The majority of extensions (plugins), the one's you will probably want to use, are a very simple install, and there is a large selection. All you usually have to do is upload one or more php files to your extensions directory and add one line of code to your configuartion file - nothing hacker level about it at all.

Performance

As far as speed goes I am not using eAccelerator, I'm on a shared host and my pages load just as fast if not faster then any of the other wiki scripts out there. You can read up on MW performance issues and solutions in the manual: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents (browse down to "performance")

Accessing Data in the Articles

As far as making the program smart about the contents in your wiki there is a solution -  Semantic Wiki. It's an extension that is relatively easy to install. With SW it's easy to use text placed in your articles as if it were data entered into a field in a database and then create an article that queries the data you ask for. This is an example of what you can create: http://www.centiare.com/Centiare:ASK

Why I use it

I've gone with MW for many reasons, not the least of which is the community using it is huge and possibilities with it are endless and samples of what you can do with instructions on how to do it abound. One of the biggies for me is having a separate discussion page. In MW you can hide the discussion and you can allow new members, or entry level editors, to post only in the discussion pages. You can also enable, disable or allow users to include the discussion pages in searches. Members are also able to create watch lists and get notified by email of changes to any pages on their watch list. Another are the templates you can use and create for transclusion in documents. The program is also probably going to be around, and improved upon, for a very long time to come.

The big downside
The big downside is access control, it's limited and there are hacks for it but it's still not at the level you may want if you want real tight control on who edits what pages.

Hope that helps.

Last edited by Ross (2007-11-03 14:07:07)

As noted by ross, if you need access control, i.e. decide who can access what, MediaWiki is a very poor solution because it was not designed to handle ACLs in the first place. Many other free and opensource wikis do this job very well.

Other engines may also be more appropriate when the priority is integration with an existing website (e.g. picking up specific plugins and extensions as a function of your real needs) rather than a full-featured wiki with all functionality built-in by default.

Evan Prodromou, MediaWiki developer, talks about MediaWiki
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid … 1740520882

A relevant IRC chat discussion:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/2007-07-18+IRC+ … discussion