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?"

Comments

Crap

[fm6]

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?

Re:Crap

[ClassMyAss]

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.

Because it involves learning a new skillset

[get quad]

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.

I can seen this now..

[goldaryn]

Because of recent vandalism, or to stop banned editors from editing, editing of this page by new or unregistered employees is currently disabled. Please discuss changes on the talk page, or request unprotection. Anyone continuing to propogate stories about the CEO, the monkey and the baby oil will be severly reprimanded.

worked for me

[bcrowell]

It worked for me. I teach physics at a community college, and our physics stockroom has hundreds of pieces of equipment that we need to keep a catalog of. The solution we tried before was that the lab technician kept the catalog in an MS Excel spreadsheet. The problem with that was that if someone other than the lab tech wanted to add something to the catalog, or document the fact that they'd moved it, there was no easy way to do it. Also, the only way to get access to the latest version of the catalog was to ask the tech for the latest (paper or electronic) copy. None of this worked very well, for example, in night classes when she wasn't there. I converted the catalog to a wiki, and I think it's worked fairly well. Nobody in the department was familiar with the concept, so they needed a little hand-holding. But even people who aren't comfortable with editing a wiki can at least understand that there's this web address they need to go to in order to find a piece of equipment.

Wikis are evil

[PietjeJantje]

I like wikepedia, but I don't like wikis. Your "knowledge base" is your web site or documentation section. If you add a wiki, I have two places to search for information, do I have to look in the docs, or in the chaotic wiki, where you won't be able to find it anyay? Wikis seem an excuse for laziness, just throw the information somewhere instead of making a structured, well designed web site or documentation section.