Posted by hackerBanana 4 hours ago
Regards, /someone who migrated 3500 users from Atlassians products recently due to their "cloud only"-bullshit.
Mediawiki as a whole has a feature set that 95% of organizations will only scratch the surface of. There's a ridiculous number of possible plugins and customization if you have somebody who knows what they're doing with it.
The majority of companies that need an internal KB/wiki do not have as complex needs or use cases as wikipedia itself or the wikimedia foundation.
Turns out no matter how much better the thing is, the users have to know what they're doing more than the operators do.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor
It's the same GUI WYSIWYG interface you get by default if editing a page on public wikipedia.
They failed to rearchitect it to something suitable for the inherent flexibility though, so it remains a disaster area, but one that is uniquely able to fit the whims of any manager that can then mandate it for everyone else.
But the awful client-server architecture, where anything you do takes several seconds of waiting for the client to send who-knows-what to the server and get data back, even selecting something from a dropdown... that is absolutely just Jira. A competing product would be able to deliver much, MUCH snappier UX. Jira is just the crappiest, slowest UI that I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to work with.
They needed someone over there with the power to say no.
The market caught on quickly that Atlassian's software fits into the group of software like Oracle or SAP that no one uses by choice and only uses because it was forced on them.
-- Churchill, House of Commons, 11 November 1947