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Ask Slashdot: Multimedia-Based Wiki For Learning and Business Procedures?
kyle11 writes I'm scratching my head at how to develop a decent wiki for a large organization I work in. We support multiple technologies, across multiple locations, and have ways of doing things that become exponentially convoluted. I give IT training to many of these users for a particular technology, and other people do for other stuff as well. Now, I hate wikis because everyone who did one before failed and gave them a bad name. If it starts wrong, it is doomed to failure and irrelevance.
What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with YouTube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like, "Welcome to working in this department. Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job." I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to YouTube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing because its' a pain in the butt.
My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on one virtual machine if at all possible. I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?
What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with YouTube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like, "Welcome to working in this department. Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job." I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to YouTube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing because its' a pain in the butt.
My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on one virtual machine if at all possible. I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?
First one to suggest SharePoint gets shot
The problem with any system is content. You said all Wikis have failed so far, have you figured out why? The answer may not be in the format itself but rather the content it provides. If you can't get the content right, and most importantly relevant, then it doesn't matter what technology you will use.
My suggestion is before you even consider doing this you need buyin from the various departments you support to help create content. If you launch with little you will be irrelevant. If you put it off long enough to fill it and make it useful then you may have a chance of surviving.
"Build it and they will come" does not apply here.
I'm not sure using a wiki is really the answer but if you insist then try Dokuwiki. It doesn't get much simpler on the end user side when it comes to using a Wiki.
https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuw...
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
You can run your own instance - my company does (as did my previous employer). It's got a few rough edges, and a few annoying bugs, but it's a very usable wiki.
However, as noted above, anything is only as good as its content. Company wikis tend to be "write only", but definitely need a critical mass to get going.
The number one problem with wikis and all other systems that try to 'store' employee's knowledge is that it requires people to make their knowledge explicit.
In your daily life and in your work, many things (if not almost everything) you do is based on implicit knowledge. You implicitly know how stuff is done, but to describe the steps you take and the thought processes you have, takes a lot of time and energy of your employees/colleagues. And then of course there's also the issue of keeping the knowledge up-to-date. Adding it is one thing, but keeping it fresh and ensuring people update the explicit knowledge in the wiki, also takes time and energy. Especially in IT, because the way things work changes relatively often.
And last but not least, people are often not willing to make their knowledge explicit, because their implicit knowledge makes them valuable as an employee. Overall you could say that the intrinsic motivation for people to make their knowledge explicit is very low.
Many scientific papers have been written on this subject. I suggest you try to find some answers there, although they may not be easy to find.
This would violate the requirement of it not being cloud-based, no?
"Here are 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customers' systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job"
Access request procedures change very fast and are tedious to contribute updates to.
Videos have a high friction to update. Out of date docmentation is worse than no documentation at all.
Wikis have a low friction to update. Even the new hire can fix things as they execute the procedures.
I don't know why people would use videos, but then I also think that videos are terrible learning tools. But then, maybe it's just me, there are some strong visual learners out there.