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Put MediaWiki to Work for You

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the howtos-and-other-meme dept.

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?"

8 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Crap by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Crap by ClassMyAss · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not going to argue that for the majority of /. readers this article offers absolutely nothing they don't already know. But the fact is, once you leave the cozy confines of the IT world, your average business-person doesn't have a clue what a Wiki is or why anyone would use one. Since at least some businesses could probably gain quite a bit from this model of collaboration, I do applaud the intentions of the article, even if this isn't necessarily the correct audience to target.

      That said, your average business person stops reading the moment they get to "Next, find the LocalSettings.php file in your wiki directory. Add the following lines: $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;..." A better way to word this would have been "Now go find those tech guys you keep in the basement and tell them you want a Wiki."

      Just a thought.

  2. Because it involves learning a new skillset by get+quad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:Because it involves learning a new skillset by bensch128 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well if there were any firefox extensions which would edit mediawiki using mediawiki formating, it would be a hell of a lot less intimidating for the average user.

      Managing a wiki isn't so hard, you just look at the RSS feed of changes on a daily basis and if there's a mistake, it's trivial to revert it.

      Cheers,
      Ben

  3. I concur! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. What's going on here...? by WWWWolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. =)

  5. Re:Extensibility of MediaWiki by pchan- · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. MediaWiki seems a strange choice for corporate use by soliptic · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I'm involved in the team implementing a new intranet (or extranet I suppose, it's international) for my organisation. A few months ago I wrote quite a lengthy paper extolling the virtues of Wiki and it's possible applications in the corporate world, for which I did a little research into MediaWiki and it's many alternatives (see also: the WikiMatrix link posted above).

    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 :) )