Mediawiki for personal webs

About Wikis, the site mediawiki says the following:

"A wiki is a type of website that allows users to add and edit content easily and is especially suited for collaborative writing."

So these packages are meant to be used for sites that are intended for collaboration, probably with contributions from thousands of individuals, like the case of wikipedia. The success of metawikipedia:wikipedia shows that this indeed is a workable model. What about using wikimedia for a personal web site. Well, I wanted to do this, mainly because I was lazy, but still needed to boast that I have a personal web site. In late nineties I had a web site. But the main reason why it was not a sustainable project was that it was written using a wikipedia:WYSIWYG software, that makes life extremely easy, the first few times that you work on a new site, but makes it impossibly hard when you want to make a small changes and add a few lines here and there! During my experiments with Wikis (that's another story for another day.) I realized that these Wikis are extremely flexible to grow, although they may have a bit steep learning curve initially. Particularly I liked mediawiki, the software behind the legendary wikipedia.

What is Mediawiki

Note

First read the entry on mediawiki on wikipedia, which is by far, better than my own explaination.

What I needed

I needed a website:

1. That I can improve incrementally, whenever I have a minute to spare for that. Probably, I may not have hours of time at one stretch.
2. That does not allow readers to add/edit articles (like the case of a normal wiki), but makes it possible for them to contribute by discussing the articles.

I did NOT want to hide that fact that this is a site based on (a hacked version of) mediawiki.

With these requirements, it was rather easy to customize mediawiki to match my needs.