[Systers-dev] Systers' Wiki Requirements

[Jennifer Redman]

As we start to take some small steps in the direction of morphing Systers
from a mailing list to a virtual community that takes advantage of some
newer technology, we came up with the idea to start with a wiki that has
secure private spots for collaboration, resources, and references.
We want to make sure that there is only one authentication hoop through
which to jump (see summer of code authentication project), and also want to
make sure we can make areas of the site accessible to only Systers' members
to maintain the comfort level that we feel on the Systers mailing list when
discussing and sharing ideas etc.

ABI is already running Mediawiki and one of our requirements is to make sure
that we add very little extra work to their system administration overhead.
 We also don't have unlimited server resources so whatever tool we use needs
to mesh well with our existing system.

Right now we are using dokuwiki for our wiki needs -- primarily because it
is generally quick (and maybe a little dirty), but the application really
doesn't have the robustness that I believe we need to handle some of the
features we'd like to include in the Systers wiki.

We don't want to move yet to a larger web-framework or CMS like Drupal or
Joomla for a variety of reasons, primarily resources, but also, I'd like to
see what is coming next with regards to web-frameworks (who knows maybe
we'll develop our own as a future Open Source project ;>).

Here is a link to the Mediawiki project for those of you who may not be
familiar with the framework (Wikipedia runs on Mediawiki) -
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Thanks to all of you who joined from Systers, feedback is greatly
appreciated, particularly:

Anyone have any experiences with Mediawiki they'd like to comment on? (Good
or Bad)

What sort of features would you like to see incorporated into a Systers
wiki?

Anyone interested in working on developing a custom Systers Mediawiki skin?
 (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning)

We are thinking about rolling out the new wiki at the end of the summer -
when the new authentication piece is complete.  Is there anyone who might be
interested in helping out with some project management or documentation?

Anyone have any experience (or interest) in developing Mediawiki extensions
to be "on deck" to add features that may not already exist down the road a
bit?

Let us know what you think,

Thanks,
Jen