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Put MediaWiki to Work for You
NewsForge (Also owned by VA) is running a short writeup on how to put MediaWiki to work for your organization. The writeup includes several addition tools that could be helpful in rounding out the overall package. From the article: " Imagine how useful it would be to have an online knowledge base that can easily be updated created by key people within your organization. That's the promise of a wiki -- a Web application that 'allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily,' as Wikipedia, perhaps the best-known wiki, puts it. Why not bring the benefits of a wiki to your organization?"
What a thoroughly useless article! It makes some vague assertions about what a MediaWiki good for, and than just regurgitates installation instructions. How about comparing this Wiki software with its many alternatives? Or even explaining why Wikis are so big?
Learning how to successfully edit a wiki page can be quite easy, however learning to completely manage a wiki and learn all of its editing and layout syntax is another matter altogether.
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
I work for a large visual effects company, and we have been using this resource for a while now. It is especially helpful when dealing with frequently changing pipelines and procedures, because it provides an easily modifiable up to date resource that can be accessed remotely from any machine on the lot.
We are using Mediawiki as documentation system to document all our servers, procedure and contacts within the tecnical departemnt. Since I am an open source advocate I introduced the system in 2003 and from there it only grew. Although you have to keep a look at it and do a re-structure from time-to-time to adjust to the amount of information it has been proven to be very useful. The only thing i am really missing is a good admin structure where it would be easy to configure a closed user group of editors since we would like to keep passwords and things like that in the Wiki too.
On the other hand an alternative would be a good password sharing solution. It should be safe and very strict in how I share password with other people using teh same too. Does anyone have a good solution to this problem?
Spelling errors were made for your amusement only...
I'm not a MW guru, but does the article's idea of <PHP> tag really do what I think it does?
As in "raw code in a a place where people can edit it?"
Doesn't matter they are trying to limit the wiki's edit access only to registered users - this is wrong.
Ugh. You know, one of the reasons why I like MediaWiki is that it does well with separating the page code from the HTML. And now these people want to sprinkle random PHP crap in the pages again. Argh.
And as an additional bonus, you get to store your mysql_connect() parameters to the page source. Whee. Realllly smart.
Somebody please submit this to TheDailyWTF...
The real way to do this is to write a MediaWiki extension, of course (look at ParseFunctions for an example of something simple), which is then accessed through the usual hooks, like {{foo:...}}, but don't ask me, I don't know that much about MW's internal structure. I just know bad ideas when I see them. =)
A wiki can be a great tool for sharing information in a company or another community.
However, the information does need to be organized, otherwise you can only really put info into it and nobody will ever find it. Luckily Sinorca4moin provides a wiki editable navigation menu, that allows you to put some minimal organization on top of your wiki.
This has allowed me to migrate the Kernelnewbies site to a wiki. Now it gets regular updates again...
It's a huge improvement on any previous method we've used to organise our documentation - mostly FAQs, instructions, process documentation, links to external resources, screenshots, all sorts. Apart from backups (VBSCript to take a MYSQL dump and copy the images directory), I use HTTrack to take a 1 link deep HTML snapshot of the 'Special:AllPages' page. This can be copied to a laptop or flash drive for offline reference. The wiki pages cut-n-paste into word nicely too.
I've recently come across TiddlyWiki, which is very nice. I'd consider that for any future small scale projects.
Simon Hibbs
I managed to add a man page reader (ex: http;//kiwi/wiki/Man:fopen) into my company's wiki fairly easily. It was actually a bigger pain figuring out how to preserve the man page format than it was how to patch into MediaWiki and add an extension.
However, you're correct. If you plan to change the look or behaviour of it, you are truly out of luck due to the MediaWiki codebase mess.
Now, I may be wrong, (and I welcome corrections if so), but from what I gathered, MediaWiki has poor-to-nonexistent support for advanced granularity of permissions. Essentially, everything is editable by everyone. Beyond that, there is a very simple level of control inasmuch as admins can lock a page and whatnot. But setting up a system whereby users come out of AD/LDAP and can edit (or not) different areas corresponding to their department/group, or setting up workflow systems where (for example) anyone can edit but it must be approved by a departmental admin (who can act as admin within their department's pages, but not elsewhere) before showing up... It didn't look as if any of this was possible.
Furthermore, I was told there's no point even asking for it. Because such things don't gel with the Wikipedia philosophy, the people spending their time coding MediaWiki simply aren't interested in implementing them. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not whinging about this - naturally they should devote their time to features which actually suit their demands, not somebody else's).
So it seems to me very odd to promote MediaWiki for the corporation, when other systems have much more sophisticated ACL-type features, granular permissions, and so on.
Comments welcome?
(PS. FWIW, we eventually settled on Plone. Plone does have a Wiki plugin so if we ever do use Wiki's I guess we'll use that. But I'm still evaluating which Wiki system to use for a separate project, outside work, but which still requires more advanced editing permission granularity. DokuWiki seemed the best fit, with the one problem that it uses flat files for storage, and our sysamin would prefer a db backend as they have a dedicated db box, so it'd be quicker. WikiMatrix narrowed it down to ErfurtWiki, Midgard Wiki, miniWiki, PhpWiki, TikiWiki, WackoWiki and Wiclear: out of these, I didn't like the look of phpWiki for some reason I can't remember right now, and I've never even heard of the others. If anyone has any experience with any of these systems, please do share :) )
It's a well known fact in large organisations that knowledge management is a bastard. All those people trying to figure out how best to share information, some of them trying out wikis, and it turns out all they have to do is design a website and maintain a documentation section! They're going to feel pretty foolish when they realise it was so simple!
Seriously, get over yourself. There will be many cases where the employees of a company are capable of providing more content than those responsible for the website or documentation are capable of handling. Wikis might just turn out to be the ideal tool for allowing that content to be shared.
Why does the article specifically focus on Mediawiki? As other people have pointed out, there are many wikis out there, some of which are faster and easier to use for certain purposes than Mediawiki. I myself run Dokuwiki on my website because it is enough for my needs and runs at a reasonable speed, unlike Mediawiki... I'm not saying that we should have an indepth review of all the different wikis in the article, but just saying "wiki software" rather than "Mediawiki software" doesn't seem too hard.