Software Infrastructure

From CharityScorecard

Collaboration

The Charity Scorecard site is a wiki, with features that allow web-based collaboration. Anybody can add content to the site, and people can work together to take that content and gradually extend, organize, and refine it.

MediaWiki

The Charity Scorecard site runs on the MediaWiki wiki engine, the same software used to run the Wikipedia project. MediaWiki is great product, but it's geared towards pages of text, and wasn't really designed to offer features like data-entry forms, structured database content, spreadsheet formulas, etc.

Emerging alternatives

At the time I set up the Charity Scorecard site, in mid 2006, MediaWiki seemed like the best choice available, compared to the other wiki software available. As new software keeps getting developed, in the years to come we might be able to move the Charity Scorecard to some sort of wiki software that's more geared toward structured content. I'd love to use something like an open-source version of Dabble DB or JotSpot Tracker (which is now "Google Sites"), or the OpenRecord software, if it reaches maturity.

As a first step in figuring out what software to consider replacing MediaWiki with, it's useful have a good idea of what it is I'd like the software to do, so that I can see if existing products do what I want. Back in February 2005 I wrote up "blue-sky" feature list, and after that I started experimenting with building OpenRecord, a new wiki engine geared toward that feature list. I have a separate web site with information about that project. For more info, see the open record web site, and the product spec page posted there.