Products · Product
MediaWiki
Raised as a usability problem by 22 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 21 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Markup is cumbersome compared to simpler markup languagesUnreviewed
20092026- Mediawiki markup is cumbersome compared to simpler markup languages2025-01-02
- Mediawiki markup feels cumbersome compared to simpler markdown-style markup languages2024-06-01
- Editing pages in MediaWiki's arcane, complicated syntax is a giant pain2020-12-04
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 24 complaints
- Mediawiki markup is cumbersome compared to simpler markup languages2025-01-02
- No good table of contents, so wiki content is hard to find and feels empty2025-01-02
- Mediawiki markup feels cumbersome compared to simpler markdown-style markup languages2024-06-01
- Getting pre-built extensions is hard; the download link is dynamically generated and confusing2023-01-30
- Felt annoying and ugly out of the box compared to modern tools2023-01-29
- Editing on phones means typing wiki syntax manually with no navigation links visible2022-03-05
- Collecting pages is awkward; config requires lots of PHP file editing2022-01-08
- Making the server private requires setting half a dozen config file variables2022-01-08
- Editing pages in MediaWiki's arcane, complicated syntax is a giant pain2020-12-04
- Wiki editors are clumsy to use2019-10-14
- Markup syntax is so complicated that writing HTML seems easier2019-04-10
- Edit page crams many unrelated functions together, making it confusing and hard to use2019-01-11
- Config file errors show a blank white page instead of a useful message2019-01-11
- Its wiki markup syntax is hard to write and non-technical users find it unappealing2018-10-02
- Self-hosting requires many hard steps: PHP versions, extensions, caching, and file permissions2018-09-26
- Editor is poor and uploading and embedding images takes too much work2018-02-19
- Search function is horrible, hard to find pages with it2017-11-06
- Table markup is atrocious and hard to write in their setup2017-03-08
- On mobile, talk page links, edit histories and category lists are hidden, so users can't browse or keep up2016-10-30
- Importer is slow and sometimes buggy, hard to use for full dumps2013-11-26
- Parsers can't reliably extract clean article text from convoluted wiki markup2013-03-24
- Editor rebinds Emacs keys, making editing text hard for the user2009-10-10
- Version control in MediaWiki is more annoying to use than git2009-08-03
- Installing add-ons requires many manual file edits, pasting code, and trial-and-error troubleshooting2009-07-13