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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?"

3 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."