Re: [DIYbio] Re: Status/purpose of biohacklabs.org?

In my opinion the thing with mediawiki is that it takes too much skill, work, dedication and trial-and-error before it works acceptably. For a large project like Wikipedia that has a lot of very dedicated and technically skilled people it's not that much of a problem. For a small volunteer-run group that just wants to focus on sharing knowledge, and might not necessarily have someone with a lot experience in using a terminal for installing some extra php-library on the server that some plugin just happened to maybe need, it might end up making people give up. Also on the user end, it could be much more accessible as well, which in many situations where someone who hasn't used a wiki before just want to quickly put something up, might end up not doing it, because it appears as too much of a hassle to for instance have to understand how the the mark-up language works. (I know they've been working on making a WYSIWYG editor. Last time I tried to set it up, I couldn't make it work. It's a year and half ago, so maybe it got better in the meantime)

On Thursday, January 7, 2016 at 8:04:15 PM UTC+1, Nathan McCorkle wrote:

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 3:14 AM, Pieter <pieterva...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikimedia is archaic technology. After being flooded by thousands of spam
> accounts and trying numerous dodgy plugins to fight it, I just shut down the
> registration.

This is a wild and ridiculous claim if you're referring to anything
but that it is written in PHP. I visit Wikipedia every day, it is
great. Does OpenWetWare get spammed? It seems not to, and I attribute
this not to plugins, but to their registration process needing human
approval.
As John Griessen asked about, yes you can use Google to sign-in, they
call it SSO (single sign on) or OAUTH2
(https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GoogleLogin).


> The beauty of grass roots movements is that they always use what is most
> useful to them, and that is different in every context.

That sounds more agreeable.

Your suggestion of WhatsApp is very odd to me, as I've only ever read
about WhatsApp getting hacked, leaking data, opening backdoors on
user's devices.