User:Richard Heigl/HalloWelt

Your name and position?

• Dr. Richard Heigl
• Co-founder of Hallo Welt!

Your company or organisation?

• Name: Hallo Welt! GmbH (For-profit organization)
• Location: Regensburg, Germany
• Founded: 2007
• Employees: 22
• Products and Services: MediaWiki enterprise solutions and services. BlueSpice. MediaWiki Enterprise Distribution

What are you using your wiki(s) for...?

Our customers use MediaWiki as a

• knowledge base,
• technical manual,
• organizational handbook or for
• IT documentation.

Customers are looking for an integrated solution, easy to use, which is also easily extensible and customizable.

How or why did you decide to use MediaWiki?

We decided for MediaWiki because we think it is the most important open source wiki project.

How long have you been using it? What do you find usefull about the software?

We are using and working with MediaWiki since 2005.

Do you make contributions to the MediaWiki communities? Are you involved?

• We supply companies with MediaWiki software and services. And via this loop way non-profit organizations benefit from the latest developments and can use MediaWiki more and more easily.
  • BlueSpice free (downloaded 1,500 times per month in more than 100 countries)
• We make sure MediaWiki is ideal for companies and ensure that MediaWiki will not be replaced by other software.
• Trying to foster sustainability for non-WMF actors, especially by developing a business and partner model.
• Promoting MediaWiki and its extensions.

see further: BlueSpice, MediaWiki and the outlook for libre knowledge, 05.02.2014

Why or why not?

-

How many MediaWiki sites do you manage?

• Internal wikis: 7
• Customer wikis: >200

How many extensions do you use?

• BlueSpice provides actually a pool of 80 extensions roundabout
• Internal wiki runs with 90 extensions (for testing reasons)

What version are you currently using?

MediaWiki 1.23.1

How frequently do you upgrade?

• Releases BlueSpice: twice per year, some patch releases
• Customers make large upgrades every two or three years, patches and single extensions during the year

What are your current activities?

• This year, we will expand our partner program and also want to create interfaces for developers.

Have you created or contributed extensions? How many?

• We publish and update MediaWiki extensions.
• All BlueSpice extensions will be published at the end of 2015. Most of them are already published.
• Currently we update NSFileRepo.

Future of MediaWiki: What would you liked to be improved?

The use of structured data will become increasingly important, which is why we want to promote the integration with SemanticMediaWiki and Cargo for companies. We would put our energy in the development of infrastructures and services. And we want to work more towards user experience and performance, strengthen the cross-connection to SemanticMediaWiki technically and strategically; updating, standardize and deliver MediaWiki extensions more easily.

What would you like to see in MediaWiki?

• Bringing internal developments and extensions of companies to the communities.
• But as our resources are very limited, we are looking for synergies. In particular, the development of new extensions and standardizations are very time-comsuming. And there’s always the danger (for us) that WMF then makes similar developments a few years later with more resource (e.g. VisualEditor) or suddenly the technological premises are changed, so we have to reprogram everything.
• Visibility: we could achieve much more if the customer does not come in a roundabout way to our website, but via well made entries on MediaWiki.org. This goes for all service providers.
• Simultaneous editing is one of the greatest features that we could use in enterprise context. Google Docs have set a standard for this. MW sets a standard for organizing content. The combination is a killer. It would also help a lot to share regularly development strategies in order to develop standards.
• Extension management like Wordpress (see further MW Stakeholders feature wishlist)

We're striving to increase the participation of non-WMF MW users. What do you think is the biggest barrier to participation?

-