[Bf-docboard] mediawiki vs docbook

[David Millet]

Hi all,

Stefano and I have been chatting a bit today; he feels strongly that
there's something better than docbook out there and so he's been asking
me a lot of questions about media wiki.  He's asked me to share the
strong points of media wiki with the rest of the list.

1) Mediawiki is easier to write with.
    - the formatting is easy to learn and very quick to type.  For
example:
        - for images: [[Image:myImage.png]]
        - for italics: ''my italicized text''
        - for bold: '''my bold'''
        - for indenting an entire paragraph, just use ":" -    :this is
my paragraph and I will be indented
        - for indenting the paragraph twice-    ::this paragraph is
indented twice

2) Mediawiki does not require heavy uploads every time you make changes
(which if I understand correctly was caused by CVS).  It comes with it's
own versioning system that makes it simple to compare differences
between any two versions of a page, and it's simple to revert back to
previous versions, all within the same wiki interface.

3) Mediawiki will take the HTML from docbook pages and accept it just
fine, we can just copy and paste from the old into the new.  the
mediawiki engine will take straight HTML as well as the other
formatting.... you don't have to use wiki formatting such as ''' or
[[ ]] when you create pages, if you don't want, although it is quicker
to do so.

4) Mediawiki will simultaneously offer us the opportunity to control
who's editing pages of the book, but allow everyone in the world to
participate in discussions about the state of each page of the book.  if
you want to see what i mean about the discussions, check out this
discussion for the Noob to Pro wikibook front page:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro  .  The
community will be allowed to see the book in open development and
provide feedback, which some of you may like and others may not, but
hey, a little bit of community feedback never killed anyone, right? ;)

5) Mediawiki will also allow us to create community editable sections
where they can further discuss the documentation and write sample
documentations so that they can be considered to be authors.  Nothing
creates a instant community like a wiki.

6) The whole mediawiki interface is easily customizable through HTML
templates.  New functionality is simple to program in if you know PHP
and MySQL (which I do, and I know quite a few other Blender guys that do
as well).

Well, this is a bit longer than I intended it to be, and I hope you'll
forgive me for that.  If you have any questions or feedback, you know
what to do ;)  Stefano needs good information for both sides in order to
make a good decision on the matter, so I hope you all will sound off
with some sage reasoning on the pros and cons of both.

David Millet
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