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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?"

5 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."
  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. =)