An unrelated rant! Wikimedia software is sucky

There are two faces of Wikimedia:

1. The kind, friendly, user facing face
   
2. The grinning evil fiend that you find when trying to install and manage a wiki

I like the first. I am strange. I relax at times by editing controversial articles on Wikipedia. So I am a truly sad person, like so many other truly sad people. It's a bizarre form of fun and I enjoy the uniquely combative atmosphere there while trying all the while to build and reach consensus for what appear to be simple edits.

The second is...... Evil.

The software is free to use and licensed for free use. And installing it is deceptively easy. My business partner installed it in no time at all. Wisely, he opted for PostgreSQL instead of MySQL (better scalability, "real" SQL, better all round), and equally wisely we set about copying over stuff we needed from Wikipedia (yes, you may do that if you attribute it correctly).

Since then we've been having conversations along the lines of "The developers are crazy". We found "The eclectic musings of a bitter software engineer." I first read it as "electric musings", but that's just me.

This thing is a mess! How Wikipedia works at all is beyond us, especially if it uses MySQL. Wikimedia says it uses PostgreSQl, but its management tasks seem hardwired to MySQL; we almost reverted to MySQL - something that is a big no-no. If you want to do something simple and logical, you can't. The amount of time it takes to do something that really ought to be pre-configured is unbelievable!