Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
other tools in use in the enterprise, the number of necessary steps to share
content is reduced and adoption is improved. Similarly, shortcuts need to
be put in place to simplify the creation of pages such as bookmarklets or
links from popular portals. Finally, content of the wiki needs to be
available from enterprise search engines to allow users to navigate
seamlessly to the wiki from their search.
Reducing the barrier to entry also means adjusting the vocabulary of
the interface itself to be more readily understandable. Fortunately,
MediaWiki provides simple ways to change just about every label and
message used in its interface. Changing 'watchlists' to 'alerts' or 'talk
pages' to 'comments' can make a difference between features being
ignored or used. In some cases, it was also necessary to move away from
the default pages provided by MediaWiki to display alerts or recent
changes and provide our own, simplifi ed version instead. Many of these
advanced pages appear too technical and cumbersome for casual users.
Some advanced maintenance tasks such as creating redirections to and
from a page or managing disambiguation can be made more accessible
with the help of a few forms and extensions. For example, the
CreateRedirect extension provides users with a simple form to create
aliases to pages instead of expecting them to manually create a blank
page and use the right syntax to establish a re-direction to another page.
Finally, there is an on-going debate about the value of a rich text editor
in a wiki. Rich text editors can simplify the user experience by providing
a familiar editing environment. On the other hand, they encourage copy
and paste from word processors or web pages, at the cost of formatting
issues, which can quickly become frustrating. MediaWiki supports both
options. Although CKeditor, as provided by the Halo extension [9], is
currently one of the most advanced rich text editors supported by
Semantic MediaWiki, we decided to use a markup editor such as
MarkItUp for the convenience of features such as menus and templates
to simplify common tasks related to wiki markup.
16.3.8 Implementation - what to expect
Semantic MediaWiki is a good illustration of the type of integration
issues that can arise when working with open source projects. It can be
diffi cult to fi nd an extension that works exactly the way you need it to.
The good news is that there are hundreds of extensions to choose from
and it is relatively easy to fi nd one that behaves very close to what you
need, and customise it if needed. On the other hand, the lack of maturity
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