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if you want a good open source game, you need full time developers who can work full time on it.

Or good management, and a team consisting of members that are aware that he/she has to take full responsibility for their expertise.

This would mean that everyone has a perfect grasp of the goals for the game, and each member's individual input is used to slowly clean up and refine the initial idea(s).
This also means that each member does its own research (based on some rough layouts in the gamedesign document), does its own QA (the feedback is directly returned to the appropriate person), and everyone has its own small gamedesign document which clearly states the progress of the assets list assigned to that person.

As you mentioned, it really depends on what type of game is being created, but I still think your Slashcraft is a doable project with a team of about 6 to 7 members.

For myself, I've just completed a gamedesign document I've been working on for 1.5 years, and started active development on a game which will partly be sponsored by non-obtrusive in-game advertisements; and will be free for people to download and play. I'm currently working four days a week, so I have that extra day to put in both managing the whole project, as well as creating the different maps and character models.

To get all our heads pointing the right way, we're currently using a modified MediaWiki, which suits us perfect in streamlining the development and content: It's very easy to make corrections, add valuable information, or otherwise make suggestions. It can also be used to store individual files, and has great structure to list all the available/completed media assets in ways so the team has a clear oversight.
The simple creation of extra sections, or tagging of pages is a perfect tool for everyone to make their own sections that they can watch over: So it sort of the same as someone on Wikipedia 'protecting' his or her content by watching over it: But on top of the checking actual correctness of the data, each teammember also overlooks the progress that is made on his or her side of the development.

Btw, for the game we're using the cleaned up Quake 3 engine (IOQuake3), and instead of creating 'yet another FPS where you can either deathmatch or capture the flag', we're working on something where the nearest similarities come from a game like Mario Party; Just small mini-like games, playable with 1 to 4 players, where each map features completely different gametypes/environments/weapons/models etc.
Some of these gametype-concepts have already been proven; I created some mappacks for fortress-mods before, where the same concept of different gametypes on each map was the main objective: For some screenshots have a look at the maps-section of my site, and in particular the maps that start with Q3F_MG and ETF_MG.

Current estimate is to get an Alpha release out within three months (which we'll be pitching to various advertisers/in-game advertising companies), so once it's out, be sure to download this game! :)

Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

is crap: see Apache and MediaWiki. The closed-source model has never produced anything nearly as radical, important and innovative as either of those two projects. The iphone's interface is laughable in comparison.

The military is starting to use open source software in more ways than people on the outside may realize. MediaWiki is used in some interesting ways, as is a certain open source instant messaging platform. Without going into detail on things that are best not discussed outside classified environments, there are other large open source software projects that have made their way into the server room.

The issue with Microsoft dependency is a long-standing problem having to do with extremely long certification processes. Another issue is the fact that in order to use anything new, the military winds up spending insane amounts of money on retraining personnel, restructuring documentation, testing in live combat environments, etc. Essentially, it's all the major problems of large corporate uptake of open source projects, with additional dependencies.

Things are slowly improving. The military uses what works, and for much of what we use in our infrastructure solutions developed on Microsoft platforms still work. That's not saying they're necessarily the best answer to a given technology need, but they're already in place and it will take some time for new ideas to get adopted.

Yeah, plenty of places want to replace Wikipedia with their own model, notably Larry Sanger's low-traffic expert-led Citizendium or the religious right's point-of-view Conservapedia... but this isn't quite the same thing.

It's really just an externalized version of the eternally-forthcoming FlaggedRevs extension (see a demo)... one that as a Wikipedian I hope will eventually be internalized.

also, wikimedia does already have OpenID support.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID

Here is Wikipedia's page on Flagged revisions
Extension:FlaggedRevs on mediawiki.org

A script?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Arf. Woof.

Samba integrates just fine in an AD domain, got a Gentoo box doing file sharing and an internal wiki in an AD domain.

File share permissions from AD using this howto

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Adding_a_Samba_Server _into_an_existing_AD_Domain

Wiki login using this howto

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAP_Authe ntication

I'm slightly confused as to how this isn't "tightly integrated" into the existing AD setup, perhaps you would explain ?

That's because China needs BSD to get rid of the cash flow that flows from the goverment to Microsoft. ^_^

And the Chinese may need Linux to make ourselves more freedom-loving?

On an unrelated note, MediaWiki.org is banned too, but the MediaWiki subversion server isn't. Weird.

I'm the Administrator of my school's homepage and I use the software MediaWiki also used by Wikipedia. Of course, it's designed mainly for community projects such as Wikipedia and Wikia-Wikis but it works equally well with few editors. And you have the big advantage of being able to open up your homepage, making it editable by others (in my case, the teachers and perhaps even students).

What I don't like about Joomla and all those WYSIWYG-Editors is, that the homepage is not standardized. Every editor has his own way of formatting and making headlines and so you get many pieces instead of _one_ homepage. With MediaWiki you just enter
== Headline ==
and every headline looks the same.
IMHO, MediaWiki is a great choice, particularly if you have more than one editor.

Isn't it? I have a USB key plugged into my machine that has XAMPP on it, and installed copies of Joomla, Mediawiki and other PHP apps as I need. Something to synchronise MySQL databases between machines would be handy but I'm sure there's something around if the need arose.

You can make a local copy. Just install MediaWiki, then Download the Wikipedia database and import it into your SQL server. Rsync is already available to download updates to the database, and it would be fairly trivial to write an application to attempt to submit all local updates to Wikipedia. Of course, articles that have drastically changed while you were offline might pose a problem. The only problem, the database takes over 10gb of hard disk space for the English Wikipedia articles, with no images.

Extensions are good because you can track the main releases and help make existing extensions to this end more robust, which is the secret open sauce.

Actually, the foundation that runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and the like does currently have six staff members. By "free", Wikipedia means that its content can be freely distributed, and nothing else really, although Wikipedia does lean towards free, open source software (it runs on MediaWiki). Having several paid encyclopedia-writers could be troubling, though, because it promotes inequality and even envy in the community, possibly driving away or discouraging those that put their free time into improving Wikipedia, or promoting elitism. Check out this page for a perspective on that; and think of the further problems that would result if this forced elitism applied to article writers!

Often, it's easier to write a featured article about something like this than something like this. As far as I am aware, there have been no repeat Featured Articles on the Main Page, so that means that featured articles keep on coming... but some are also being defeatured due to quality concerns. There was a net gain of four featured articles this week—gained nine, lost five. Often vandalism gets in the way of constructive article writing, and people have to spend more time on that, rather than on content-producing.

Finally, one of the goals of featured articles is to get an article to a place where it is incorruptible... but not unimprovable. (Motivation is another goal.) So if someone helped bring an article to featured status, they might notice any factual errors that were introduced. Wikipedia certainly has dynamic... but it's losing some of that. With a team of vandal-fighters and no content-writers, Wikipedia will only be able to preserve integrity -- not improve it.

The data is available as XML, but to clone the site you need the MediaWiki app.

Our group evaluated a handful of workgroup tools: issue tracking, revision control, documentation. Trac was in the list, but it fell short on a number of points after we tried it for a simple project. We wanted SVN integration and liked Mantis, so we hooked in scmbug. It took a little tweaking to setup the 'products' in scmbug to meet our Mantis usage pattern, but it does the trick. Throw on your favorite wiki (mediawiki, twiki, moinmoin, etc.), and you are covered.

~8 million students and teachers at almost 20,000 institutions, including some pretty large ones like the Open University, UK, UCLA, NZVLE, etc.

Compares quite well on features and usability with the market leaders in a >1 billion $ market.

One could mention that mediawiki thing, also:0).

While not specifically for the uses stated in the article, we use MediaWiki for all our documentation nowadays. This has replaced the dreadful Lotus Notes as our documentation management system.

We've setup an internal Wiki site using the MediaWiki software.

Forget gzip. You can do SMP or cluster-based bzip though...

http://compression.ca/pbzip2/

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Dbzip2

Mediawiki needs coders! Get YOUR code into running a Top 20 website! http://www.mediawiki.org/

Well, there is FCKeditor. Tie that together with a decent wiki, and you have a pretty good CMS, IMHO. I know Oddmuse supports this kind of integration, and I'm sure other wiki's do, as well (I know MediaWiki has got experimental integration).

Most wiki software, including that used by Wikipedia stores every revision. Why not blow that up into a privacy concern also?

The article really doesn't do a great job of articulating what the Mindtouch Dream framework actually is.

FTA:
Applications written with MindTouch Dream can be done in PHP or .Net languages such as C# or Visual Basic. Programs can run on Microsoft Windows machines or Novell's Mono software for running .Net applications on Linux or Unix.

I'm having a hard time understanding what MindTouch Dream actually provides. Is it a development environment framework? A IDE? It isn't clear to me how an application written in "MindTouch Dream" can also be PHP -or- .NET -or- C#.

Deki on the otherhand is clear to me, it is a port of MediaWiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki with extensions and provisions for managing Microsoft documents, AJAX support, and exposure as a Web service (REST based).

All in all, I'm a little confused as to the exact value this release brings, other than some better support for M$ based content environments.

The Wikipedia software can confirm an email address. This is not enabled in the English Wikipedia site.
Help:$wgEmailConfirmToEdit: Require users to confirm email address before they can edit.

Hey, I'm just going by their own FAQ: What can't MediaWiki do?
While versatile, MediaWiki isn't suited to all purposes. In particular, users should remember that it is designed to allow open-editing, and doesn't provide very complex per-page access restrictions. Users seeking such functionality ought to consider using software dedicated to that purpose, such as document or content management software.

Sure, it has very rudimentary support for simple access controls like read/edit, but it is probably not sufficient for the average business. There's nothing *wrong* with it for other purposes though, especially places that are more open to editing the content, it just didn't fit our environment so I am looking elsewhere.

This sounded odd to me too, because I'd heard that limiting edit access to registered users was an available configuration option. So I checked: $wgGroupPermissions does this now (1.5+), replacing $wgWhitelistEdit (1.1+).

This article offers the insane learning curve of giving a really broad overview of why you'd use a wiki, then discussing how to develop it. Typically, the builtin configuration pages or existing plugins would go in between those.

This sounded odd to me too, because I'd heard that limiting edit access to registered users was an available configuration option. So I checked: $wgGroupPermissions does this now (1.5+), replacing $wgWhitelistEdit (1.1+).

This article offers the insane learning curve of giving a really broad overview of why you'd use a wiki, then discussing how to develop it. Typically, the builtin configuration pages or existing plugins would go in between those.

And, TBH, I'm not aware of any OSS that lets you throw together an intranet with shared documents, task lists, announcements and other dynamic elements as easily as Sharepoint.

Twiki and Mediawiki are easier, and more featureful. They don't have a whole ton of desktop integration, but it's phenominally easy to throw together an intranet with all the stuff you listed (plus a bunch more) using a wiki.

• Knoppix, live linux boot CD ("rescue"), http://www.knoppix.org/
• Unix Rosetta Stone, table to convert linux vs bsd vs unix, http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
• GNU screen, switch between shells in one login, priceless via ssh, http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/
• GNU stow, simple package management for ANY posix system, http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
• vim, not vi (I depend on ^P and a real undo history, note emacs is not so great for sysadmins who need quick changes on dozens of architectures), http://www.vim.org
• sudo, especially when giving a group permission as a non-root user as in my /. post groups + sudo can allow installation rights , http://www.sudo.ws/
• wiki, which tells people how to do things without bugging the sysadmin, (any wiki is good, I use mediawiki), http://www.mediawiki.org/
• CVS/Subversion, note changes in important configuration files (cvs is for older Unixes that can't run svn), http://subversion.tigris.org/
• rdesktop, remotely log into windows Remote Desktop/Terminal Services, http://www.rdesktop.org/
• fail2ban, drop traffic to attacking IPs (ie, failed logins) for small intervals, http://fail2ban.sourceforge.net/

They might have been refering to Mediawiki, the wiki engine that drives Wikipedia, and a lot of other wikis as it is free as in beer and as in speech.

MediaWiki (a la Wikipedia) has reat revision control for HTML and image content. I use it for almost everything (thesis, wedding information, blog). It's also really easy to use!

I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers.
Sell your idea to ebay, they might like you. (and the highest bidder wins!)


  If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included?
That's easy, BitTorrent.


  How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers.
1) Visit homepages of said OSS
2) Get the sources
3) Right-Click Ctrl-V
4) Get headache integrating code from multiple projects^W4) Discover 'magical' missing libraries^W4) Consider rewriting everything with existing code as reference^W4) Give up^W4) ????
5) Profit!

The Mediawiki software allows for marking edits as "patrolled" -- so the ability is there. As for wikipedia's policy...

It looks like you have two options, get a dedicated server from someone like EV1 Servers for $99/month or setup your own box on your broadband connection (assuming you have broadband). I use EV1 and I would recommend them if you want a dedicated server and are willing to do your own system administration.

As far as software I'd recommend Subversion for source countrol, Bugzilla for bug tracking, and MediaWiki for general documentation. I'm in the process of setting this up for my own projects right now.

I am currently adminning (for that, read; owning space on the server) for a MediaWiki which is being used for documentation, discussion, planning and grading for a 4 man, 2nd year university project.

We talk, argue, link and plan on the pages. Our tutor has access and leaves daily comments, along with his own arguments and links. When we have something to hand it, we just let him know which page it is.

He can track who has done what, and how active we all have been, and since everything is dated, he can take a "view" of a document which might evolve, but for grading purposes has to be "handed in" on a certain date.

It's useful, fun, and makes exchanging information easy.

• Wikipedia
  
• Firefox
  
• OpenOffice
  
• BitTorrent
  
• MediaWiki
  
• Xvid
  
• phpBB
  
• Outfoxed
  
• Dyne:bolic
  
• GIMP
  
• Apache
  
• SourceForge
  

Some have insightfully pointed to distributed distribution. Some argue that it would be impossible or impractical...I disagree, in fact distributed distribution should be one of the primary efforts of wikipedia supporters. If the aim to truly free information they should go about thinking how they can de-contextualize it from the wikipedia-brand/ institution. To free information we must aim to maximize possibilities for non-coercive free association. To accomplish these goals within our capitalist context we must align with institutions that can concentrate power to the point of which it is beneficial to the collective, wikipedia is one such institution. But at the same time we should do this with an end goal of freeing the information from the context provider. To do this we should do some serious thinking about distributed distribution.

As many of the posters have identified non-profit institutions are vulnerable to corruption, coercion, capital mismanagement, government regulation etc. Free culture should aim to dismantle exclusive information distribution within its own institutions, in effect supporting wikipedia as something larger than its-self. We can already loudly applaud database dumps, the open source backend, and openness of the foundation, but let us not assume that wikipedia as a mediator of free information is the end goal because then we might be left with another Google when the potential of participatory culture is so much greater.

PHP-based applications can be great if designed by good programmers.

For proof, just look at some of the projects using PHP: Mantis Bug Tracker, PHPMyAdmin, MediaWiki (Wikipedia), several top discussion boards, Friendster, reportedly apps by Yahoo, and countless others.

These are HIGH-QUALITY web applications. Of course, great things can be done with other platforms, but it's nonsense to slam PHP because "it's so easy that non-programmers produce a lot of crap code with it". The proof that it's worthy is in the *best* apps that are produced, not the worst ones!

It wasn't MediaWiki , it was TWiki. They have (AFAIK) nothing to do with each other.

We've been using MediaWiki for this exact purpose: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki. It's easy to install, a snap to manage, and makes it easy to share your knowledge with the rest of the world if that's something you want to do.

http://www.mediawiki.org/

This should let you do your text in whatever language you want, although you might find yourself wanting to tweak the style sheet.

MediaWiki

I can personally attest to the power of wiki.

Thanks for the terrific suggestion to switch to a wiki.

Hey, no problem. For what it's worth, my personal preference is MediaWiki, because it has a number of top-down and bottom-up organizational tools, such as [[Category:]]. There are some other good ones out there, though. Don't be discouraged by the number of rudimentary wikis out there; they're very easy to write and somewhat entertaining to make, so lots of simple ones exist. Take the time to look for alternatives, if MediaWiki doesn't suit you; there are some other, very different, very high quality wiki suites out there.

Oversight should include a representative from the target grade level, to avoid ivory tower-ism.

I dunno. If they write textbooks, it's because they know how to write textbooks. Kids aren't writers. It's been my (admittedly limited) experience that allowing a client to design reduces the quality of the object, whereas allowing a client to specify constraints results in a high quality object.

So, just like Wikipedia, Wikinews will have areas where people interested in certain topics will work on these topics only, while at the same time benefitting from the potential for massive collaboration, i.e. the entire community can quickly get involved in an individual dispute, or try to refine a problem article until it meets our standards of quality and neutrality.

What other kinds of metadata do you have in mind?

I convinced my company to use Mediawiki at work for collaboration. We never looked back.

... I only discovered it a few months ago, and what really struck me was not only was the quality quite high, but the technology itself. The wiki concept is rather striking.

So then I got to thinking, what if instead of using wikis to have a homepage, or an encyclopedia or a text book - a site recording fact - if you had something recording ideas and thoughts.

You know, you come up with ideas for say coding projects, or even just things that should be made and you know you're not going to do anything with them, and you want to let them form into something more with other people. So you go to sites like ShouldExist.org and bandy them around.

But what if you did it as a wiki? And you didn't restrict it to your software todo lists? And what if you could write fiction there and hold debates? And you know, muck about with other people's idea and perhaps form them into something that could happen?

So a few weeks ago, I got hold of Mediawiki, the software used by Wikipedia, and setup VagueWare.com. And it's starting to work. It's good fun. Open source think tank. A kind of a "Bazaar" in the ESR sense for thoughts and ideas.

So for me, the best thing about wikipedia is not the 300,000 articles, all of them quite good, but it's the software underneath it. It's allowed me and my friends to build a big playpen that anybody can join in with.

So, well done for 300,000 articles, but most of all, thanks for the best wiki software on the planet. My life would be worse off without it. :-)

MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.

Check out the current feature list and the development roadmap. Subscribe to wikitech-l to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.

There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki and MoinMoin. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase, which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.

A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.

This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.