MediaWiki is a great platform for creating knowledge database, such as Wikipedia. While a documentation and a knowledge database might appear to be similar in nature, they are indeed distinct applications of human learning and human knowledge.
A software documentation has several objectives, the main one being to help users achieve a clear, synthetic understanding of said software's usage and capabilities. For this to happen, there needs to be a clear point of entry (or a few of them) for the user, as well as a structure that is simple to assimilate.
MediaWiki achieves none of these, as it is by nature a knowledge database, meant to represent the entirety of the available knowledge.
Aside from theoretical considerations, it is a fact that the lack of a clear documentation has hindered SM from becoming more widespread. Continuing in this path will only help keep hindering its progression.
I think most SuperMemo users will agree that its pioneering techniques make it superior to other software of the same class. Yet, if that is true, why is not the more popular software of the lot ? Is it because it is not open source ? We would argue not. If computer users chose software based their choice on whether they were open source, we can state with confidence that a great many software that have achieved monopoly today wouldn't exist.
MediaWiki is a great platform for creating knowledge database, such as Wikipedia. While a documentation and a knowledge database might appear to be similar in nature, they are indeed distinct applications of human learning and human knowledge.
A software documentation has several objectives, the main one being to help users achieve a clear, synthetic understanding of said software's usage and capabilities. For this to happen, there needs to be a clear point of entry (or a few of them) for the user, as well as a structure that is simple to assimilate.
MediaWiki achieves none of these, as it is by nature a knowledge database, meant to represent the entirety of the available knowledge. Aside from theoretical considerations, it is a fact that the lack of a clear documentation has hindered SM from becoming more widespread. Continuing in this path will only help keep hindering its progression.
I think most SuperMemo users will agree that its pioneering techniques make it superior to other software of the same class. Yet, if that is true, why is not the more popular software of the lot ? Is it because it is not open source ? We would argue not. If computer users chose software based their choice on whether they were open source, we can state with confidence that a great many software that have achieved monopoly today wouldn't exist.