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Other Uses for Wiki Software?
CodeMonkey22 asks: "The much-discussed Wikipedia could be considered the quintessential definition of what Wiki software is capable of. More recently, however, a plethora of specialized reference websites, such as Wookieepedia (Star-Wars) and the Marvel Database (Marvel Comics), have popped up. This got me to thinking, are websites the only viable use for wiki software? Working in an IT department, the first alternative that came to my mind was an intranet knowledge-base. TWiki, for instance, touts itself as 'an Enterprise Collaboration Platform'. What other uses could take advantage of Wiki? What changes would be needed to make it more applicable in other areas of use?"
I was actually thinking about this earlier today. Would it not be pretty useful to use wiki software for customer "tickets" in tech support?
Seems pretty sensible to me, even if it's a little overkill.
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
I know the original question is about non-website uses, but my idea could be intranet based also. I had the idea for a collaborative writing sytem at wiction.org but things came up and I never finished the site. I still think it is a good idea though.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Documentation for open source projects, such as this example from VideoLAN's wiki. Also, collaboration on new features
Video Production Support
What you should be asking yourself, is what can CVS/Subversion be used for?
Modern wiki software is really just a subset of what any good repository offers (versioning, resolving conflicts, moving files around, etc.). The only difference is that they provide a nice LaTeX-like syntax and a pretty front-end with an on-the-fly interpreted syntax.
Really, LaTeX backed by CVS would give you many of the same features. The possiblities of a repository-backed work are virtually endless!
However, the front-end on Wikis make them extremely nice for collaboration on numerous distinct text-based documents. The inter-linking and (relatively) simple syntax allow users to focus on sharing their knowledge. I think the next step for Wikis would be WYSIWYG editing, to de-emphasize any kind of syntax at all. This would make them truely user-focused.
I work in IT installing software and other kinds of support. I've been trying to convince the boss to use this for documentation as a lot of our stuff changes without warning and we don't have anything to keep us up to date otherwise. But sadly have been unable to get him to see the light. Jst the usual right something up on it for me and then watch him forget about it.
Lage corporations are great that way.
TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com/) is effectively a wiki in a single web page. It sounds odd but is very impressive, it can be used for free format note keeping with all the linking etc that a wiki implies. There are a number of enhancements on the web - various customizations including skins.
It's obviously not for multi-user use but great for personal stuff.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
The Trac project is rather nice, a wiki with svn and bug-tracking integration, for use in collaborate project management.
We use one over at the Toughbook wiki to keep track of details of various machines.
I've been looking for a good table manipulation tool. Wiki tables like the HardwareComparison quickly grow out of control. A way to sort and filter records, show and hide columns, an define alternate views for tabular data, would be great.
I picture sort of a webmail-like interface. Perhaps the data shouldn't live in the wiki page at all, but in a real database back-end with the appropriate interface(s) for adding and editing records.
In some projects I work on, the bosses email a "tracker" spreadsheet back and forth, where each site has a row, and each stage or activity has a column. They sort and filter the spreadsheets to get a picture of progress. One challenge is getting the data in, since it comes from dozens of different field techs, shippers, other companies, and arbitrary other events. Another challenge is making sure everyone has the most updated version, since emailing a file around is effectively file-level locking, so no more than one person can be working at once.
A central store like a database, with web interfaces that any Excel weenie could use, would alleviate much of the trouble. A hybrid of spreadsheet functions, database query tools, and wiki-like markup, could be really powerful. Anyone know if such a thing might exist, or if such projects might be in the works?
I once had a (custom coded...I lost the code a while back though) Wiki which was supposed to house a movie script (just a small camcorder, sub YouTube quality type thing). Worked quite well, I think...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I'm in the process of creating a wiki for a test ITIL implementation. As far as I can tell, it will be great for the Configuration Management Database, and therefore the Change Management, Service Desk, etc. processes because they can log incidents against particular machines, and RSS feeds for the machines' wiki pages will alert the relevant sysadmin that there's an incident to look at.
:)
Anyways, it's kinda pie-in-the-sky for me at the moment, but I'm convinced it will work, and cost considerably less than the commercial ITIL tools that suck
We've used it sometimes for things like:
-documentation on a project
-knowledge base for various IT stuff
-sharing various infos (guides, training stuff, etc)
///<sig
I set up TikiWiki for my department to track projects. We are a commercial HVAC firm (my dept is the automation side), so CVS and the like don't (at least I don't think!) really apply. But I do the engineering and layout, with others doing the actual installations and we needed a way to easily transfer information. They always have their laptops with them, and have VPN access to the office, so this idea came to mind.
It has worked pretty well, and quite a few people in other departments have started using it too. It's a nice way to do "brain dumps" and record those things people tend to say in passing in the hall! I still have a few people that "forget" about it and call / barge into my office to ask a question. "Did you check the wiki?" standard response now!
Agenda tool, (non-profit here, lots of meetings), you create an agenda wikipage for the next meeting, participants add or make changes to the topic list after the meeting the notetaker completes the page by ading in the outcomes and creates the next agenda page, not only do you have less paperwork you also have a building history that all can refer back to without hving to look up file names.
Staff directory - (assuming you don't have like AD or LDAP), includes addresses emails, etc. Changes are made on the spot and therefore most up to date.
Knowledgebase - either a replacment or an extension to the job procedure manuals, all staff can add into it and make changes as needed, as well as add content as special circumstances arise.
Documentor - if the apps are web based you can even program wiki links into your pages to the documentation (as well as link in your job procedures if on the same wiki) As program changes or as better instructions/definitions the documntation gets updated.
Project notes repository - self explanitory
Simple CMS - Keep the editing behind a password/access system but offer up the content as read-only to the public, opens the sirte for editing beyond just the webmaster.
I like the story board idea.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I am currently adminning (for that, read; owning space on the server) for a MediaWiki which is being used for documentation, discussion, planning and grading for a 4 man, 2nd year university project.
We talk, argue, link and plan on the pages. Our tutor has access and leaves daily comments, along with his own arguments and links. When we have something to hand it, we just let him know which page it is.
He can track who has done what, and how active we all have been, and since everything is dated, he can take a "view" of a document which might evolve, but for grading purposes has to be "handed in" on a certain date.
It's useful, fun, and makes exchanging information easy.
When I was hired to be half of the tech-support department for my art school, I set up a wiki on my PowerMac as a place to put whatever documentation I generated. Anything I might otherwise scribble on a piece of paper, or what I would have put into a WP document back in the 1990s, I can instead key into a web page, and it's accessible and updatable from anywhere there's a net-connected computer, including at home (handy for reviewing and documenting today's accomplishments or previewing tomorrow's projects with a strong drink at hand). It hosts lists of software in each classroom, a table of permanently assigned IP addresses, an exhaustive list of tasks to accomplish between semesters, a checklist for how to lock down the Windows boxes, software serial numbers (did I mention that the whole site is password-protected?)... basically any info I - or my boss, or my future co-worker - might want access to, whether in the office or not.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Wikis were in use at universities almost since the beginnings in 1995, especially at Georgia Tech, which uses e.g. Squeak/Smalltalk based Wikis (In fact, SWiki, the Squeak Wiki, seems to have been the first very popular Wiki software around). Swiki is used there for collaborative work among students groups, documentation, programming courses etc. Some other examples are find in Ward Cunninghams Book about Wikis. So, I would say, there are a lot more ways to use Wikis besides (Technical) Documentation or Knowledge Bases (I would Wikipedia somehow count as one, too). One other example is the organization of meetings like the Plone Sprints in the Zope community.
Practically every team in the MIT Mystery Hunt used some sort of wiki to coordinate the team.
My fellow group members and I are using a Wiki to organize out project. This includes documenting each members' ideas, collaborating for report writing, and general discussion.
Also, we're unofficially using it as a collaborative note-taking tool for class. Someone takes notes on their laptop during class, then posts them, and the other members go through them with corrections/additions.
So far it's working out rather well.
- shazow
We use FlexWiki at Ask Jeeves, corporate wide. Anyone can go to http://wiki/ (inside the company), and go through all the information/projects etc going on.
It's REALLY nice, I like it alot. Very easy to make a new page for a new projects and have peers add ideas to your page, etc.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
the first alternative that came to my mind was an intranet knowledge-base.
Took you long enough. Anyway, the one thing lacking from Wikis in that area is group-page access control. TWiki is the only Wiki which claims to sort of have it, but also warns vigorously that it doesn't work securely.
The main criticism of the company Wiki I set up is that there is not an easy way to control access to different groups. Management doesn't want, for example, Marketing to have access to edit (or maybe even view) Accounting's wiki material. I've had to set up a parallel MW instance with restricted access in order to lock down some material, but I don't want to have to do that for all possible Wiki-using groups.
Unfortunately most Wikis are not developed with alternative uses in mind. MW development is notorious for not supporting or adding any feature not required by WP and its information-should-be-free philosophy. TWiki seems to specifically court that market, but they can't be that serious about it or they'd close the search hole.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Are there free Web hosts that does Wiki? I would like to make an ants FAQ or something as a Wikipedia software.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Basically, wiki is so fast that one can create a fully functional and cross-referenced web site on the fly, while carrying out a discussion on the topic. This could be used as a lecturing tool and/or as a note-taking system.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
My creative collaboration partners and I use DidiWiki (a very small and stable Wiki server) to house the knowledgebase of our roleplaying universe, and to house stories and related tales that end up being written about it. Character sheets, timelines, synopses... Wiki does it all.
;)
I won't post a link to it here, naturally.
Bleakness... Desolation... Plastic Forks...
Wikis are being used increasingly as CMS-replacements, as they should, as working with a CMS is hugely unappealing. See the http://www.mono-project.com/ website for a reasonable beginning example. Another exciting use is as a simultaneous mostly free-form encyclopedia and structured knowledge base, database, or whatever. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki.
I head an IT department. Our internal wiki is gold; half of the answers I give out are along the lines of either "have you rebooted?" or "take a look at the wiki."
The development team and the sales team also use the wiki to a degree - it helps in collaboration and notes. Lots of people keep notes to themselves that would actually be quite useful to others in their department or even the whole company. Putting those notes on the wiki, even if poorly organized (which is definately the case), is a good step in the right direction, as things get cross-referenced eventually, and other things are searchable.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Mediawiki (of wikipedia fame) lacks in two places when it comes to image galleries: First, there is no pager (i.e. first, previous, next, last, index). Second, uploading updates to images is not trivial and the automated resizing is a bit clunky. When you update images, you completely replace them. There has to be some less primative way to do this, even if it is as simple as an image-diff program and more intelligent sizing.
Also note that this concept is not limited to images; again look at google's video beta - you see indexed videos based on surrounding text, with automaticly generated stills from regular intervals of each video. This can easily be implemented in a wiki.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Sensei's Library is one of the most creative uses of a Wiki I've seen. It's all focused around the game of Go (Wei'qi, Baduk). The owner modified it, added some scripts, that allow for easy creation of board diagrams, etc. And, most importantly, it's got a strong, knowledgeable community. Overall, it's one of the best resources for Go players. As far as Wiki's go, it does its job fantastically well.
First, let's pretend that U.S Congressman carefully debate the pros and cons of proposed legislation.
Then, I think that Wikis would make a wonderful forum for developing legislation. Especially those 400+ page variety bills that seem to contain all sorts of pork. Of course, modification of a Wiki page would be restricted to Congressman and their aids (hopefully not lobbyists..). State and local legislative wikis might also be useful.
Hyperlinking between chapters/portions of bills might make reading the bill easier and focus attention on poorly written parts.
Of course, for a Wiki to be useful, the debate has to be in the open and not in the proverbial "smoking room". O well!
Favorite
I introduced a wiki (MoinMoin) at my company about a year ago. My inspiration was a comment somewhere about how if you show people how much better a wiki is people will naturally use it.
With this in mind I started using it as a personal notepad. After a while, when someone asked a non-trivial question I would document it on the wiki and direct them to it.
Over time people started using it on their own and now it is a normal part of many people's workflow.
-Adam
At my work we just started using a wiki for documentation and procedures. It really has changed things for us quite a bit. We are moving over to it incrementally and everyone gets to be part of the process due to the nature of wikis. We are using mediawiki and eventually someone will add moderation features, but until then it's really great for this.
I'd suggest if you are in a position to get a mock up running on your intranet it is definately worth trying out. So far people are enthused about it. It took a while to get everyone involved, but now that they are it is kind of snowballing and just getting better every day. YMMV
Had anyone considered the possibility of using an offline wiki for simple content creation? (It's an idea I had several years ago, but kept to myself.) I am not an expert, but I bet that wiki software could be modified to run as a self-contained desktop application, and it might be made robust enough to serve as an alternative to an office suite.
Imagine a piece of hypothetical software called WikiOffice for a moment. Users can create files similar to those made with word processors, spreadsheets, slide presentations, help archives, etc., and other types of media could be imported and put to use with plugins. (I bet it could even support applications and "applets" using an internal scripting language.) WikiOffice would use a single file format capable of all such things, and the files themselves would essentially be miniature wiki databases. (For actual editing, the user might choose either to use a WYSIWIG interface or write the markup himself.) Individual pages (or sets of pages) could even be exported to other formats, or the entire file could even be split into two or more independent database files.
Also, if a user wants to distribute a file that can't be modified in certain ways, he can freeze some or all of the pages with a password, or assign group permissions the way an admin for a multi-user application or operating system commonly does. Concievably, copies of the file that have even been modified in different ways can be somewhat merged back into each other by an admin, much like many CMS systems can do.
(Of course, as surely as I post this, another Slashdotter is likely to point out something that already does most or all of this.)
My family uses a wiki to run our family home page (g-b.dk). It took a little extra to set up, and it does put some restraints on what we can do, but it makes editing and updating a breeze for any family member.
"Good news, everyone!"
I'm using a wiki (SnipSnap) as a writing aid when working on fantasy stories. Great for writing stuff like character backgrounds or history material for my own reference.
At work we use TWiki for our intranet, and as a help system for the application we develop. Works perfectly!
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
I've seen several different Wikis go down the documentation route, and I'm a member of a few.
A few months back I started up a Wiki to tie in people that use different dating and social networking sites. I also use it to quickly bookmark items I want to share with others, or have them do so likewise: the idea is not so much to be a "dating" site vs. a means of creating a social web.
http://www.wikidating.net
Unfortunately, the most activity I get currently, are the spambots. (history -> save -> comment "restore"): you know that routine.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
I saw a demo of ZOPE and it allows this sort of collaboration and control. It is not as easy as a wiki but it does have what you need. Might be worth a look.
... Wiki be with you!
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
The one I currently use is WikiPad a Windows-only app which doesn't use/need a webserver. It just allows me to add free form notes very quickly without structure, but automagically adds Wiki style links when I use CamelCase words in the text. Very lightweight. The only thing I miss about it is the ability to add Wysiwyg style formatting, it's all Courier fixed font stuff. But it's saved me loads of time not having to scribble things down on my paper pad.
I've also used Perspective, a proper Windows based Wysiwyg Wiki, but again installing on a work box can be a pain, so I ususally come back to WikiPad.
I made an anonymous gift giving wiki (very much like Secret Santa, but better) among my friends. See: http://www.toastedalmonds.org/secretsanta Makes cheating very hard to do (except for the main administrator). Its a challenging setup in terms of access-control lists. This is the second year in a row I've used this system, and it works very well. People can be cheap or as generous as they please.
a computer based education?
Business Week recently did an article on alternatives to e-mail, which discussed wikis. The point of the article is that wikis are increasinly being used to replace e-mail as a collaboration tool (IM is also discussed). Anyone who as ever sent around an e-mail requesting comments from multiple people understands that technique's limitations. Nothing really new in the article, but it does indicate more mainstream adoption. It also gives some examples of companies who are using the technology (and how).
Maybe a little late to post to this thread, but hell, why not? One of the things that I use my Wiki for is a living Help file. When a user selects help in our application, it takes them directly to a page in the wiki, that is relevant to what is on their screen right then and there. This makes it easy to keep the help information up to date, since we don't have to distribute it, and it puts discussion of problems adjacent to the help instructions themselves. Its especially usefull when the wiki has some kind of discussion or comments feature enabled.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
I setup a wiki (mediawiki) for the TV Program, 3D: Dialogue, that I host on OMNI TV. The producers use the wiki to store info on guests, topics, shows, research, overviews, factoids, and the script. It makes it a lot easier for the shows to be produced and have all the necessary info available to the people who need it. The G4Tech TV show http://www.g4techtv.ca/callforhelp/>Call for Help in the same studio as my show, and they also use a wiki to produce their show.
I'd been thinking that a wiki might be more useful than JavaDoc for providing the business analysts with a view of an implementation model. They just need to know what attributes are available and where to find them, not the implementation details. Maybe provide links to the corresponding JavaDoc details.
If you had a way to share filtered content between wikis, you could create a few aspects and let a user set a preferred default aspect. Other aspects would be available as cross-links between the wikis. For example, you could have a wiki indexing the source directory and object hierarchy for developers. Another aspect wiki would focus on business attributes for the BAs. Realistically you could have a wiki aspect for any development/business role your infrastructure requires.
Wiki portals are obvious as well. Being able to pull together key info people need to do their jobs is the main purpose of intranet portals.
Search engines already crawl wiki content, so you don't need anything special to search across the wikis, but you might want a customized intranet search engine that lets you select aspect/subject wikis to be searched.
Instead of intranet based, you could do the same thing with/for a web-distributed development team.
A lot of content is better kept in forums, though. Wikis are tag-definition based searches, and forums let you group subject content without requiring a subject identifier.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You could set one up for the purpose of having a game of Lexicon! A good example is The Toothpaste Disaster, set in the 'Paranoia' RPG.
Similarly, some friends and I used a wiki as an adjunct to a far-future MUCK: character bios and area reference got dumped into the wiki, to help us remember what the hell was going on in our real-time text roleplay as things got more and more complex.
I think I've also seen people using wikis as multi-author choose-your-own-adventure platforms; pretty easy to make that work.
My room-mates and I experimented with a wiki for our house, but that didn't go anywhere.
I've heard of some people using a wiki running on their own machine as a sort of free-form personal information manager. A little bit more complex than the 'live in one giant text file' ethic some practice, but almost as portable and future-proof.
egypt urnash minimal art.
I just released a new version of Wikalong that is compatible with Firefox 1.5 last night.
Wikalong is a Firefox Extension that embeds a wiki in the Side Bar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet.
Wikalong... Karma be aganist you!
Best Buy Corp uses Wiki for intranet use all the time. company policy., history and new ideas are all communicated via the wiki.
I use a wiki for notes on stories I am writing - not so much for storyboarding, but certainly for keeping character notes, locations, artifacts, etc. This is particularly useful for epic fiction where you have a lot of character names to keep straight.
I use Kwiki and create a new instance for each substantial piece.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
So a brief caveat here - I'm a bit biased as to the potential uses for wikis, since I started and run PBwiki (which was developed at an all-night hackathon, but that's another story). If you're interested, I also gave a talk at Xerox PARC about wikis.
I think pretty much any time you email out a Word document and ask several people for changes or edits, you're in need of a wiki. Any time there's a "Document Master" for a particular piece of information a la "Oh, Linda's in charge of the phone list, you should let her know you have a new number" or "Tell Jimmy what you're bringing to the potluck" or "Coach Z has the schedule for the softball season" -- those are ideal spots for wikis.
While many people do use wikis personally, as a sort of notepad-on-steroids, and others use wikis as a simple web page publication tool, the killer app for wikis is in letting groups speak as one and create their own little universes of knowledge. Sometimes this means collaborative fiction or Dungeons and Dragons and sometimes this means documenting your project plans or brainstorming your next company idea.
While wikis have been around for some time, they're only just now starting to cross the chasm from geekland to the leading edge of regular people. Wikipedia can take nearly all of the credit for that. But hopefully we'll now get some of the power that geeks have had by way of CVS and Subversion and put it in the hands of regular people to collaborate and coordinate their thoughts, hopes, and ideas. This has been a long time coming.
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
I presented a paper in July 2005 titled "Using Wikis as a Low-Cost Knowledge Sharing Tool". The authors describe their experiences using a wiki to prepare and upgrade task-based training courses. The wiki was used both as a repository for the training materials as well as a daily communication vehicle for multiple co-authors working in Canada and Austria. If you are interested in reading the abstract or the paper, it is available on a wiki that has anti-robot password protection. Start on this page to get the password: http://saturn.eton.ca/
The Semantic Wiki page on Wikipedia is a good starting point. I have also written my own overview, including an annotated list of known efforts. Finally, the Semantic Wiki Interest Group is the best place to go to get involved or watch for new developments.
I am particularly interested in the possibility of augmenting wikis with mechanically-derived content. For example, there could be a Doxygen-style wiki page for each function and data structure in a system. Users could create new pages and/or annotate mechanically-generated pages. I am working on a specification for a wiki that could support such a system, but it's still quite speculative.
Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development
Having a good permission system enables systems where you can decide how people interacts with the system (i.e. adding or viewing content) and where. The extensions enables i.e. drawings editing in a wiki-like scheme and its integration enables i.e. putting portions of blogs in wiki pages or including editables spreadsheets in.
My biggest use of it was for documentation, mixing blogs for tracking progress of projects, adding editable diagrams of networks, organizing and grouping the information in wiki pages and giving different kinds of priviledges to the development people (editors) from different kinds of viewers. But a lot of people gives a lot of different kinds of uses for it i.e. KDE project or voip-info.org.
In my opinion Wikipedia isn't a good example of what a wiki is capable of. The original wiki at c2.com is far better. Wiki's allow discussion to happen right in the middle of an article, the fact that something is being disputed or queried is in your face in the article. Wikipedia's dicussion page is badwrong as it kills one of the strengths of a wiki.
Wiki pages should turn from discussions to information and then after time back to discussion and so on in a slow cycle. Wikipedia always wants the pages to be information which simply cuts against thegrain of what a wiki can and should do.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
Wikimedia will have a booth on the SCALE 4x exhibit hall floor. SCALE 4x is the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo. It will take place on Feb 10-12 at the Los Angeles Airport Radisson.
In my project, the biggest impediment to wide-scale adoption was the inconvenience of logging in all the time. Due to the sensitive nature of the information in the wiki, we had to secure it against anonymous browsing*. This means yet-another-login-name-and-password - which is of course the death of ease-of-use.
What I wouldn't have given for a decent single-sign-on solution for MediaWiki + eDirectory (that doesn't incur additional dollar cost to our client).
Anyway, the collaborative editing function of the wiki was handy enough, that management asked for another wiki, just for management people, for the task of contract review. The biggest hurdle here is the import-export of the wikitext <--> MS Word.
*Documentation is only as good as it accurately reflects reality - so our documentation includes our warts. Our contract is up for bid, and anonymous browsing would expose those warts to the very company that is bidding against us. No, we didn't feel like handing ammunition to our enemy. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have learned and implemented a different system, that has a granular permissions system.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Wiki technology must be great for open source project pages, or at least Novell thinks so... As best I can count, they have eight (or more) projects set up that either they manage, contribute to, or support using MediaWiki.
These are:
Mind you, these are all great sites, with good content. They seem to really be embracing the notion of community-driven projects, to the point of not only accepting community code, but also accepting additional community support though the use of Wiki for the websites and documentation. Take a browse through these sites, if you have time - they are full of great ideas on how to use a wiki.
Kudos to Novell for once again being innovative in open source. Give me even more hope for their future and for the success of SUSE Linux.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Set up a wiki, set the privileges so that only the site's owners can edit and add pages and presto... the simplest Content Management System. Works really well for small companies where you train one or two persons to be in charge of the site.
Use something like ZWiki that has a big application server behind it, so you can integrate other tools (shop, blogs, forum) and let the site grow as needed.
"Took you long enough. Anyway, the one thing lacking from Wikis in that area is group-page access control. TWiki is the only Wiki which claims to sort of have it, but also warns vigorously that it doesn't work securely."
Actually, the Confluence wiki says it has page level access control tied to groups and individuals.
We are currently evaluating it for use for our Intranet system. Confluence is not open source, but features like these might make it worth paying for.
I am curious if anyone has any experience with the Confluence wiki?
I need some advice for selecting a wiki engine.
These are the features i need:
- runs as CGI in hosted enviromnent (so doesn't require root access, RCS, etc.)
- user authentication - HTTP Basic Auth.
- ability to make some pages invisible to some users
- ability to make some pages read only to some users
- simple markup
- file uploads, image embedding
- utf8 support
These are features that would be nice to have but i could do without them:
- email page change notification
- easy backups (accesible from web)
- i18n-ed interface
Any recommendations?
Plug in a yacc-style parse tree generator, and users can write things like this or this..
I use my MediaWiki installation as screenwriting software. Maybe not as full featured as something like FinalDraft, but it's free, has built-in version control, and allows collaboration.
Then, I think that Wikis would make a wonderful forum for developing legislation.
It's a nice idea until someone sneaks in an amendment that would never pass on the floor.
Personally, my dream application for legislation is legislative diffs and versioning for the US Code. Have you ever tried to read a piece of legislation like the Patriot Act which is over 90% changes of words and phrases here and there throughout the US Code? (Add bioweapons & chemical weapons to this law about nuclear weapons, etc.) I only got about 15-20% of the way through the bill before giving up because I got tired of going back and forth to the US Code.
I want the ability to click on a section of a law and see what it does to the rest of the US Code in context with all other surrounding changes. You'd see the original text and the new text with modifications in a different color. Much like most GUI SCM tools, you'd be able to click arrows to go to the next diff.
This functionality would also be great for amendments to bills so that you could see the changes cascade through the bill into the relevant laws. I (and I'm sure a great many lawyers) would seriously pay thousands of dollars for an application which could read in a bill, identify modifications to the US Code, and intelligently mark up changes without human intervention and manual tagging. This would be a killer app for any Congressman, lobbyist, watchdog group, or lawyer.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A great use for wiki technology is to maintain Man Pages updated. Most of us know that some man pages are spartan at best, and few get updated regularly.
The Waikato Linux Group have published most of the linux man pages on their wiki site. This way anyone can edit/modufy/update these manpages.
Great idea.
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I used to send myself emails to my home address while I was at work, and to my work address when at home, for when I needed to send myself reminders, links, etc. Now, I just edit my wiki setup on Apache at home and jot stuff down. I even added a grocery list, xmas gift list (that my family was free to edit), and even phone numbers/contact info. At work, we use one for adhoc development documentation -- we found that "official" documentation intimidated the developers (who're notorious for not writing stuff down) into thinking that everything had to be grammatically-correct, properly categorized, and using the corporate letterhead before they'd right anything down. Our instructions could be summed up as "right it down, we don't care what it looks like, you or your peers can fix it later". So far, its working very well.
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Really, a wiki could be useful in many a collaborative project, it's all about making a multisource fount of information.
As for an example, WikiBooks (generally howto or technical in nature) are a great idea, and I could see the creation of "story worlds" for actual novel-style books being a possible wherein authors developed individual characters, stories, or parts of a greater world.
For PyCon 2006, we have a wiki page containing the master schedule data, and a parsing script to generate an HTML or pickled version of the schedule.