Wishlist for MediaWiki

A wish for Wikis

The concept of the Wiki is excellent as a platform to enable to collaborate internationally. Participation needs to be expanded to the rest of the world. Present experience is that qualified educators who are used to responding to emails, using word processors and making presentations take days of training to use the present Wiki system – and then many still have difficulty after the training. It needs to be made much easier to use.

To continue being used, and to possibly gain support from educators other than very early adopters, the user-interfaces will need to be made much easier to use – more sophisticated from the perspective of the educator who has little or no interest in the technical wizardry behind the scenes. This is not a wish-list item, but an essential to move to mainstream use by real-world educators in the majority of the world.

Users and consumers have little loyalty to brands. It is important that the Wiki system stands up against possible alternatives on its features and not only on an ideology. Users always have choices and so any system being considered must be as robust and sophisticated as possible alternatives – free or un-free, as perceived by users.

By Paul West