Topic on Manual talk:Managing data in MediaWiki

All three of these say they're 'easy' to install. Personally, I find Wikibase a bit harder than the other two. I'm not really sure how to qualify that here though. I think it depends on what you're used to, with regard to extension installation. If you have a basic wiki, and install SMW or Cargo, nothing much changes until you start editing properties, templates etc.; but if you install Wikibase (although I've never run it in production, so I maybe shouldn't be commenting) there are often extra configuration steps required, and backwards-compatibility is not supported (which is totally fine, of course, but for your average non-professional wiki sysadmin can make things more complicated).

Could we say Wikibase has 'medium' installation difficulty?

It said "medium" until Addshore changed it here. I've never installed Wikibase, although from what I've heard it can't really be classified as an "easy" installation. On the other hand, this is a a pretty subjective metric - not quantifiable. It's not the kind of thing that usually shows up on mediawiki.org. I would say it's good reason to remove this row.

I put "medium" in the first place. At the time I first wanted to try it, I gave up (but this is some time ago).

I can only tell you that at Wikimania, several people in different workshops indicated that installing Wikibase is not easy. Even WM Germany people acknowledgte that and said that this is something they want to work on.

So I think it is very misleading to put "easy" on all three, because on a running MW instance, you just do some simple steps for SMW or Cargo and you are set.

So, everything regarding installation is a matter of opinion.

For Wikibase, if you read the small docs / installation guide page, which includes downloading the extension, adding a couple of lines to local settings and running install.php, then you have wikibase installed..

I imagine you do the same set of things for Cargo and SMW.

Thus I don't see why the installation of Wikibase should be medium but the other extensions discussed easy.

I think the extra complexity is mostly around having to set up multiple wikis and configure the sites table etc. Out of the box, after "normal" installation of the repo and client extensions, you don't get a very functional wiki (e.g. default sitelinks are Wikimedia references; search is ). If you want to do more, such as be able to query the data, there are more things to be set up.

For the other extensions here, after the most basic installation there's nothing much changed in a wiki, and most further configuration is done in wiki pages.

I'm not saying that it's hard to set up Wikibase, but it does feel to me to be out of the ordinary in the universe of MedaiWiki extensions.

I think it's probably also getting easier: for example am I right in thinking that the search box no longer defaults to just searching items?

Anyway, we're not going to have a hardness-rating on this comparison page, so all good. :-)

I think again this comes down to needing to define the thing we are comparing. "Installing" is easy, advanced configuration is more advanced, if you want it to be exactly like Wikidata, expect more pain.