Francis's Site Francis's official site

One of the things I hate about MediaWiki is that you have to use those [[Category:name]] (name is a placeholder of the category's name) links at the bottom of the page. In Drupal, you can enable tagging (makes an AJAX field for tagging; searches for existing tags), multi-select or select from a drop-down list. This could be complicated if you have to categorize/tag the article a lot of things. You couldn't simply copy-paste a comma-separated list into a MediaWiki article, but have to put those category links at the bottom of the article. This can be confusing because MediaWiki also uses the square brackets ([[ and ]]) for both internal links and "inter-wiki" links too. Also, there is no tag cloud extension available for MediaWiki.

Another thing why MediaWiki is bad because you can't add HTML into a page; you will need to either use MediaWiki's complicated syntax or hack into the code. Also, the site is more vulnerable to XSS (cross site scripting) and code injection because anything suffixed with .css or .js (ans sometimes prefixed with "MediaWiki:") contains CSS and JavaScript code (and MediaWiki code) respectively (and since it's wiki software, a hacker can do so easily). In Drupal, only pages with PHP evaluator on will be vulnerable (most sites turn this off and Drupal 6 turned it into a separate core module turned off by default).

Lastly, MediaWiki has a complicated way of getting clean URLs.

Reccomendations to MediaWiki developers

• Add a tag field to articles
• Allow HTML to be inserted without needing to hack it
• Forbid access to regular users (including anonymous) and allow it only to admins OR put the .css and .js files in a separate place and not integrate it into the wiki itself
• Allow clean URLs with Apache's mod_rewrite module and make it available from the "Special Pages" section to admins