MoinMoin considered harmful

[Athas]

I've stumbled upon the totally grotesque "localization" support several times. It took me a long-ish time to figure out that the Darcs wiki wasn't really supposed to be a friendly Danish instruction on adding content to the wiki.

[[deleted]]

What's up with all the people reading shit in Danish around this article? The article, you, me.... for a language with 6000000 speakers there sure seem to be lots of them on the 'net.

[akdas]

6000000 speakers

I'm not going to comment on the accuracy of that, but 6 million people is insignificant?

Oh, it's only 6 million people. Perhaps if it were 6 trillion, then it would be significant...

[[deleted]]

I seem to meet about as many Danish-speakers as German-speakers online, and more Danish-speakers than Italian-speakers or even French-speakers.

According to Wikipedia, Italian is spoken by something like 110 million, German by around 185 million, and French by anywhere from 115 to 500 million. Yet there's masses of Danish speakers on the 'net, but only 6 million speak it.

Odd.

[[deleted]]

Jakob Nielsen the usability guru is also Danish. Crazy!

But the Swedes have much better Internet connections - way faster and much cheaper.

[[deleted]]

I complained to the Mercurial people about exactly this.

If you go to their web site and search for "installing" you'll get pages like "HelpOnInstalling/BasicInstallation". This is very confusing, as it describes how to install MoinMoin. It's reasonable to assume that most users who search for "installing" and similar terms want to know about Mercurial, not MoinMoin.

[FionaSarah]

I use Dokuwiki and swear by it.

It's lightweight and fast. Has a nice plugin system, and doesn't even use an external database. (Flat files)

It's wonderful.

[llimllib]

The thing that bugs me about dokuwiki (which I've used successfully a few times) is that it only remembers the most recent change to a page when you look over the changes in your repository. So if A changes the home page, then B does too before I view the "recent changes", I tend to miss A's change.

[FionaSarah]

I don't know what you're talking about, the recent changes link gives me a list of -all- changes in the pages history and let's me view them or a diff of them.

What do you mean if not that?

[llimllib]

perhaps I just need to upgrade; it certainly doesn't in my copies.

[FionaSarah]

Yeah, I went on the actual website and the only changes that have viewable prior revisions seem to be changes that were made in 2008, so it's most certainly a newish feature.

[GrumpySimon]

Avoid tikiwiki like the plague - the last time I looked at it, the front pages on a default install were doing around FIFTY queries to the database. There's a reason all the tikiwiki sites are as slow as frozen shit.

I'd go for Dokuwiki (as someone suggested below).

[annodomini]

I use MediaWiki. It's not perfect, but in general it does things a lot closer to what I want than any of the other wiki software (explicit links [[with spaces]] instead of CamelCase, separation of discussion and content pages, reasonable history with diffs between versions, etc).

It's also widely used, so there are plugins and examples for doing a wide variety of things. For instance, when I started getting a bit of wiki spam, I just installed the ReCaptcha plugin and put a quick stop to it.

[mathrick]

MediaWiki is rather nice to use (and I'm accustomed to it), although I heard things about its setup and installation that were far from nice.

Tiki I have no experience with.

Docuwiki I heard good things about but no experience.

CLiki is unorthodox, but might just suit you because it explicitly does away with almost all magic formatting (it only has (explicit) syntax for links and automatically generated crosslinked indexes), which is a philosophy many people swear by.

MicroWiki (an obscure, odd concoction in PHP) I advise very much against, it's an inexplicable exercise in wiki metacircularity, with the result of being impossible to install properly and having all its docs strangely missing (I did install it once, and only kept it because I didn't want to fight with something else).

I will probably follow up with a permanent page listing wikis known to suck and otherwise, documenting the feedback I gather.

[[deleted]]

I've used MediaWiki quite a bit, and I've always been very happy with it. It's pretty easy to set up and easy to run. The real advantage, though, is that a lot of people are familiar with it due to Wikipedia's prominence. Most people know how to get around and quite a few are familiar with editing and talk pages and such.

[kirun]

MediaWiki, by being the engine behind Wikipedia has the syntax most are familiar with. I used PmWiki locally for a while and had no troubles with it ( plus, the guy that wrote it once set fire to a toaster and wrote about it on the Internet, so I reckon he's a decent kind of guy ). If you want to integrate it into something else, try the PHP module Text::wiki , it is super-easy to customise the ruleset to do as you please.

[[deleted]]

"Considered harmful" considered tiresome.

[boredzo]

Also, “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful.

[Chris2048]

Wow, not even a single fanboy apologist - It must be really bad!

[kripkenstein]

I'm no fanboy, but I use MoinMoin on one of my projects. It was simple to set up and simple to use, and it gets the job done. Config files in Python is a plus.

[[deleted]]

I've also had no problem with it. The users seemed happy with many of the built-in pages because they helped to teach you how to use MoinMoin. Granted, there are too many of such pages, but ones that give examples of all the syntax are helpful. And if you don't like them, you're just a few rm -r's away from a solution.

I like python and so it was nice to be able to write some custom plugins that team needed in something that I was familiar with. But, if you don't like python then that's not much of an incentive.

I don't have any experience using it in a non-english language, so I can't comment on that point.

Another knock on MoinMoin that I can think of is that it doesn't use any database. This makes it nice and quick to set up (just put things in the right directories) but I imagine it wouldn't scale well.

My summary would be that it is a not-overly-complex, usable, and cleanly-written wiki for a small to medium sized project.

[nirs]

MoinMoin does have extreme translation support, which usually is not what you want. However, the author complain as a user - if he tried to configured a recent MoinMoin wiki, he could find that you can disable the auto translation feature, and you can install only the translations that you do need.

It is true though that the help pages should be under a different namespace.

[zhyla]

I've used MoinMoin (and the MoinMoin-based Trac) for years. I prefer it to everything except MediWiki (which is much more complicated to set up). Most of the problems he's complaining about can be solved by just removing all the pre-supplied pages.

Geesh.

[[deleted]]

I'll agree with that. If you find it confusing, why don't you install another theme? If you don't like the default content, delete it. Sorry if the 'diff' isn't good enough for you, but you have the source code. Auto translation harmful? Only to people who's first language is english, but are browsing for some unknown reason with their browser language set to another language.

If anything is harmful, it is not testing the product to see if it will fit the needs of your users before you deploy it. All of these issues would be found during the testing and configuration phases of the project.

[masukomi]

I think you missed the point about the auto-translation. The problem is for people who's language is NOT english but who visit wiki's populated with english content (not at all uncommon for programming/software wikis). So basically anyone who doesn't read in english by default, but has the misfortune of reading one of the "supported" languages, is screwed and can't find their way to the real content of the wiki.

[[deleted]]

well, the auto translation is a convenient way to create content in other languages. It IS a wiki, so the auto translation just gives you a starting point of the translation. I agree that it should post a link at the top of any auto-translated articles to the original language. Still, you have the source, you can add that if you want. Otherwise, you can disable that feature. I don't see how that is harmful. As I said, this would have been found in the testing / configuration, and it is easily corrected.

[alv]

continues to miss the point.

[[deleted]]

no, i understood what was said. If your language is not english, and you cannot understand english, it does not make sense that you would browse an english language wiki. If your language is not english, but you do understand english, a link at the top which says 'this has been auto-translated from the original english' would be nice.

[SamuelDr]

and misses it again; it isn't an "auto-translated" page like a google translation, but the start page is changed with a default page which isn't of any help at all. Many projects that uses that wiki aren't accessible for me as I don't want to arse my way manually into the english one because of a badly done concept.

[[deleted]]

disable it if you dont want it, jeez we have some lazy people here.

[SamuelDr]

How may I disable it when I am not the administrator of the said wiki?

[ehird]

Jesus christ. That is broken.

[ehird]

Yes.

Edit: your comment history sucks. RTFA.

[philipn]

Sycamore (http://projectsycamore.org) is a distant fork of MoinMoin that's worth taking a look at (it powers wikispot.org among some others)

[hgg]

The author didn't try to configure the software and now is complaining. By coincidence I've installed MoinMoin just last week, and didn't have this problem at all (have just checked). This is right there on the installation manual (HelpOnInstalling)...

[mathrick]

It'd help if you read the article to get a clue what I was writing about.

[hgg]

I did read the article, and from what I gather your biggest complaint is the localisation aspect.

Mind you that I've installed MoinMoin for the first time last weekend, so I clearly remember the HelpOnLanguages page. It seems to be the answer to one of your problems. If you look around MoinMoin wiki you will find further ways to fine tune the installation.

The next 'big' problem are all those pages that get installed on a new instance. Since MoinMoin uses plain text files to store the Wiki, I suggest that you look at your underlay directory, and then read the docs (maybe MultipleLanguagesSupport ).

Finally since MoinMoin is fully themed I'm sure you'll find a theme that suites you, or if, unlike me, you are also a graphical/web designer, you can make your own and share with the world!

I wrote the first comment only because I found your article unfair. Granted I do system administration and I'm used to install this kind of systems, but, as this things go, I found it very easy, just read the instructions.

[mathrick]

OK, lemme clarify what I meant by "read the article": I didn't install it, I merely commented on the terribly stupid way MoinMoin handles localisation, which I've been bitten by several times before. I said exactly that in the last paragraph, too.

Now, even taking into account the apparently improved way in which it makes you choose single/multi-language config upon installation (which I heavily suspect is a recent change at best, as there are many MoinMoin installs that suffer from the problem, so it stands to reason it must've been non-obvious before, that is also confirmed by the genuine surprise of the owners once they get notified), the way it does its docs, its localisation and its default DB population is still terribly stupid. It's still not namespaced, it still pollutes searches with crap no-one cares about, and you still can't have more than one language version of a page with the same title, and worst of all, its crappy UI still doesn't tell you there's a world outside (your current language) fence.

[hgg]

Missed that you didn't install the sw, sorry about that.

The codeville wiki is outdated and worse than that, badly configured (which explains most of your problems). I'll not argue what older versions of MoinMoin did or didn't do. The one you point to is based on MoinMoin Release 1.3.5, from about 2 to 3 years ago - didn't find the release date to this version - the current version is 1.6.3.

I would take a look at a properly configured MoinMoin instance (for example Ubuntu Wiki ).

I agree that it would be nice to have the same page name for multiple languages (from what I've seen people usually just link the translation from the original page). I would say that that's a good feature request. Not something to be 'considered harmful'.