August 2007 Archives
Thanks to Virgil Griffith and his Wikipedia Scanner that helps tracking the source of edits in the online encyclopedia, we know that some organizations like to edit Wikipedia according to their own agenda. Wired highlights changes made by Diebold on its own page, that some have liken to vandalism.
In no times, I was able to track down changes made by Nedap, another vendor of electronic voting machines, to the page on Electronic Voting. The change, which boils down to bragging about the fact that Nedap sold some machines in Italy, and dissing competitors technologies, has been done in six steps on the same day (Feb. 6, 2007, with a lot of rewriting performed on Wikipedia, not well prepared it seems).
Hey, I worked with the king of web standards! How cool is that? (Actually there were many kings in the kingdom kitchen and the result would still validate more than two years after inception, if they would just fix that silly empty H2 tag that floats alone around line 87).
P.S. Fixed, it does validate now. This is what happens when you craft lovely content management tools so that non web-savvy marketing people can push content straight to the web. Aki, you rock (and doubly so ;-)! Seriously, I'm both happy and impressed that this design resisted so well with time (considering how difficult it's been to give it birth, to say the least).
Sun is deploying wikis as a public extranet on wikis.sun.com. They're using Confluence from Atlassian, a product I've used in two real life implementations of an entreprise wiki ([shameless plug] and with which I have significant experience now [/shameless plug]). Tim Bray has a post about the launch and wonders on his "wiki ranch" if he can make it more open to external contributors.
Meanwhile, I reacted on Martin's comment on Tim's blog:
Too bad Sun does not use free tools, like MediaWiki, for the internal Wiki. I manage a high-school reunion wiki, and although the syntax is hard to grok for non-techies, it is flexible and sooo open! It allows me to automate the registration process using some simple Python code between a Google Spreadsheet and the MediaWiki site, hosted freely at http://www.wiki-site.com. Libraries used: Google API (http://code.google.com/) and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_the_python_wikipediabotIf I had choosen other closed Wiki offering I could not have done all those nice automatic features!
Martin's comment is so typical. The real cost of a wiki isn't in the license, but in its development and growth. I've got several real life exemples where it would have cost several times MORE to use MediaWiki than to pay a license for Confluence and use it out of the box (that's what Sun uses too, and my little finger tells me it's not just a coincidence!). Most open source software (and MediaWiki in particular) absolutely suck at end-user features such as a really working WYSIWYG editor (no, wiki syntax isn't any "simpler" for casual users than HTML, it's just Fucking Ugly Code™ for them), or usability. And let's compare the complexity and cost of maintaining a bunch of "free" spaghetti code (bricolage!) assembled by a geek hobbyist to a product that comes with enterprise support and can be managed by non developers, etc., etc.
Sorry, but for entreprise wikis, the available most open source options are simply not up to par with the commercial offerings. I don't take a cut in selling licenses, and my clients perfectly understand that it's in their interest to pay a license if it's less costly for them than customizing a "free" software that they won't be able to maintain without endlessly paying a developer.
And a last note on MediaWiki, which fames derives only from Wikipedia, it's made with only one goal in mind: powering Wikipedia, period. Just take a look at the features (and lack thereof) and, most importantly, its documentation. One can only wonder, in front of such an horror: either the developers suck at documenting their code (too bad for people who make a tool for an encyclopedia) or the software isn't suitable for such a task. In either case, it's bad.
A German web security searcher has found seven XSS (Cross Site Scripting) vulnerabilities in WordPress and has launched a patch for them... in the form of an XSS blog worm!
[From Blogsecurity and Planet-Websecurity]
