I am a neophyte wikipedian, hoping to learn more about Mediawiki in a way that is useful to both myself and others. My ambition, ultimately, is to ascertain whether or not mediawiki is a platform I may modify and extend to practically (finally) bring about the hypertext utopia described in Ted Nelson's Dream Machines. Though Mr. Nelson is apparently still pursuing his dream of bringing Project Xanadu to fruition, I am heavily sceptical of vaporware and am a strong proponent of the Unix philosophy, particularly: "Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it." I take the view that Wikipedia and her sister projects, as well as all of the independent Wikis, forum boards, newsgroups, infuriatingly encrufted online newspaper websites, blogs, and the rest of the read-write web (aka Web 2.0) are just a prototype for the kind of real hypertext revolution prophesized by Nelson all those years ago.
In short, I have drunk the Xanadu kool-aid, but I'm not holding my breath that the actual Xanadu software system will ever really get off the ground in a usable way. Mediawiki, for all its quirks, seems to be the worse is better equivalent to Xanadu's decades-in-the-making cathedral.
Please excuse this rather grandiose user page, especially as I've yet to make any actual edits as an official, logged in user (though I've edited plenty before) or check-in any running Mediawiki code.