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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.
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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!
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.
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Well LaTeX seems too arcane to most people. Maybe it's just a matter of paring down all the non-essential features, but I think there is more to it than that. The wiki idea started by saying hey, people already have certain habits, for plain-text email, Usenet, etc., to express *boldface*, _italics_, paragraph breaks, hrules etc. so let's just parse those forms, and then there will be no learning curve - at least for people who already have those habits. The degenerate case is that plain text, with no adornment other than double-carriage-returns between paragraphs, is wiki syntax. Of course then you add a few more features and there is a little bit of a learning curve, but not too bad. TeX on the other hand makes you feel constrained rather than free, with a lot of rules to learn and follow. At least, it's always trial and error for me.
:-) But those are features for browsers to add some day.
I try to maintain my resume in LaTeX but haven't been really happy with the existing converters to generate HTML. So my impression is that it's really too paper-oriented, and I'm not sure what you would need to do to make the transformation to HTML as direct, efficient and suitable as possible.
Knuth I'm sure would say, web pages are so ugly - lousy default fonts, no kerning, no right-justification, and you can't even control where the page breaks fall when you print it. aye-ei-ei.
I agree with you that version control was a very useful addition to wikis, and its importance (and ease of use) must not be underestimated.
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.
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