Topic on Project:Support desk

I am planning to design a social media site that functions similar to Facebook but using the MediaWiki engine in addition to the Social tools and perhaps Semantic MediaWiki. I don't have any servers yet and I plan to learn PHP, HTML, and Javascript,. How it would work is that the website would have user profiles where they can edit their own profiles, and have personal name spaces for their messages, blogs, personal pages, and posts. Also the users are able to friend other users, and create and join groups, with the group having their own fourm and wiki pages in which the group members can edit, as well as having group chatrooms. Users can also create pages about their businesses and interests. MediaWiki would also be useful for special rights over each groups and the entire wiki. Perhaps I can research some extensions that can be useful, and if there isn't an extension that I need I can develop my own for the website.

Do you think MediaWiki can be used to create a social media site, and if so is it a good idea to use MediaWiki or give it any wiki functionality?

And if any traditional social media site has used MediaWiki, may you please give me examples?

Wouldn't it probably be much easier to use some forum, or better yet, social networking open source application for this purpose?

For all the things you will want in your social wiki, will require MediaWiki to be heavily modified while most of those should be available out-of-the-box for social networking applications.

To make a website successful, a lot of the work needs to be put into the content of the website. If you end up spending most of your time in learning "PHP, HTML, and Javascript" (I'm assuming you already don't have a working knowledge of them) and further customizing extensions, you are going to have no time left for the more important work needed to make a website popular.

See Social Networking and Forum applications for a relevant list. Discourse is one forum application that I think can do all the things you want to do, out-of-the-box.

I have two questions: If I decide to make a wiki - based social media site, can I use a wiki engine other than MediaWiki?

Or can the above applications can be used with MediaWiki or other wiki engines?

You can use other Wiki applications too, but you will have to look through the different services to see what fits your needs. I don't have the personal experience to be sure what would be the best fit for you.

Some things one type of application does better, while in other things another type of application is better. Mainly depends on what kind of a community you are trying to create.

Most of your needs in one way or another do get fulfilled by MediaWiki, but it doesn't provide the most smooth and intuitive user experience. For example, live chat extension for MediaWiki is not that impressive while other Social Networking applications and Discourse does much better. A good (but far from the best) chat implementation that I saw used with MediaWiki was a third-party chat application like the one you can see used on some sites for customer support. The feature to restrict all but one group of users from editing a particular page, although does get implemented by a few extensions, as far as I remember, all of them suffered from one issue or another.

It is also possible to use multiple web applications at the same time. For example, to have wiki.sitename.com as the Wiki part of the site and forum.sitename.com as the Forum. However, you might need a very supportive community to make such an implementation popular.

Okay got it, thanks!

But is it okay if you list some extensions that can restrict a group of users from editing a particular page?

See Extension:Restrict access by category and group and Extension:CategoryPermissions.

But there are usually some limitations and bugs to such restriction extensions.