Wiki feature for mahara

[Son Nguyen]

Version: master

This is a new feature for Mahara. It provides the wiki feature for mahara users.

There will be 3 groups of users

1. Institution and site admins who have all permissions of editing, managing and administrating wiki pages and users.
2. Institution staff who can edit and manage wiki pages
3. Normal users who can only read wiki pages

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Patch for "master" branch: https://reviews.mahara.org/3562

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Son,

Thanks for submitting the 3562 patch. However, I've abandoned it because I think it's not the best way that Mahara should pursue this feature. The patch that you submitted, creates one site-wide Mediawiki site inside Mahara, which is only editable by Mahara admins & staff. However, the main use case for a wiki in Mahara is to allow multiple (student) users to collaborate together. And, putting MediaWiki inside of Mahara has the downside that we would have to keep our MediaWiki library instance up to date, which could be burdensome.

So instead of this implementation, we should pursue one of these two options:

Option 1: Write a plugin for the MediaWiki software, which allows Mahara to be integrated into it as an authentication source. (We actually already have this for mahara.org, but it could use some work.) This achieves the same functionality of having one site-wide MediaWiki site, but it moves the MediaWiki support burden outside of Mahara.

Option 2: Take a lighter-weight wiki library, and set it up as an interaction plugin, so that individual groups can have wikis. (Or it may make more sense as an artefact plugin? Would individual users want groups?)

[Son Nguyen (ngson2000)]

Hi Aaron,

Thank for your feedback. The reason I put the MediaWiki inside of Mahara is that I want it as a part of Mahara, so that
1. People installing Mahara will have this feature not having to install a separated wiki site and configure it to work with Mahara;
2. As mahara admin, we can easily configure mediawiki to allow users to edit wiki pages;
3. It is easier for the developers to implement sharing features between Mediawiki and Mahara, e.g. showing an user's image artefacts in a wiki page.