So today, I discovered that MoinMoin has an “all or nothing” attachment setting: either everyone with write permission to a page can upload attachments, or uploading attachments is disabled for the entire site. No exceptions. Period.

Not only that, but there is no maximum attachment size setting — unless the attachment was uploaded embedded in a ZIP file. How’s that for irony?

Not wanting to have my railroad site turn into a file trading site, I don’t really want to let everyone upload attachments.

Oh, also MoinMoin doesn’t maintain a history of attachments. So if somebody drives by and vandalizes an attachment, you get to…. restore the original version from tape. Yay?

So I decided I’d look back at MediaWiki, which has better attachment controls.

I still had my test installation, so I went to use it. I edited the main page. I wanted to read about the markup, so I clicked the “Editing help” link. Whoops, broken link. It links to Help:Editing on the local wiki. Which MediaWiki does not install for you. I asked about it on #mediawiki. The answer was: copy from mediawiki.org. OK, fine. How? “Cut and paste.” Yes, that’s right. Every time a new version of MediaWiki comes out, you get to cut and paste dozens of pages from mediawiki.org to your wiki, or else you’ll have outdated help. Yay?

The MediaWiki folks on IRC seem to like it this way. “Not everyone wants the same help.” Fine, but provide a sane default for those that don’t care.

Who thought running a wiki would be so hard?

Update: since yesterday, I went to moinmo.in and fixed the ThemeMarket page to reflect what versions a MoinMoin theme works with. I’m happy to help out with fixing Free Software — though I don’t really have time to add fundamental features like working syntax help links on this particular project.