Put MediaWiki to Work for You 171
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?"
Does it come with Admin tools? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Does it come with Admin tools? (Score:2)
Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashvertisement. (Score:3, Funny)
as part of a sales pitch.
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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: $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;..." A better way to word this would have been "Now go find those tech guys you keep in the basement and tell them you want a Wiki."
Just a thought.
Re:Crap (Score:2, Insightful)
The issue the other person seems to have isn't that this article exists, but rather that it was posted here (which you agreed to in the next paragraph). This is quite simply a bizarre article for Slashdot -- it's superficial, ther
Keep reading, fm6, how this is a big deal. (Score:2)
From the article:
let's see where the wiki comes into its own. Try editing the Main page, save the changes, and then click on the History tab. You'll see that MediaWiki tracks who made all changes and when. You can compare the differences between different versions. In one fell swoop you've got yourself a document management system as well as a potential in-house knowledge base.
Let me put that into perspective. One of the main features selling M$ Word is easy to use vers
Re:Keep reading, fm6, how this is a big deal. (Score:2)
A collaborative editor might be a better replacement than a wiki. With a collaborative editor two or more people can have the same document open on different computers at the same time. When someone types words into the doucment they appear on other peoples screens in real time. With a wiki y
Re:Keep reading, fm6, how this is a big deal. (Score:2)
It's not both "much better" and "free." Either they have to give up some functionality, or they have to re-learn the wiki, and at the least yo
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Wait...
Wiki works (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the information does need to be organized, otherwise you can only really put info into it and nobody will ever find it. Luckily Sinorca4moin provides a wiki editable navigation menu, that allows you to put some minimal organization on top of your wiki.
This has allowed me to migrate the Kernelnewbies [kernelnewbies.org] site to a wiki. Now it gets regular updates again...
Re:Wiki works (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wiki works (Score:2)
For internal "corporate" documentation you need to be able to have projects, programs, systems, servers, etc all in a pretty deeply nested structure and each with it's own set of people responsible and with the ability to delegate permissions. Needless to say it needs to be universally searchable.
Oh and one more thing, it needs to be
Re:Wiki works (Score:3, Informative)
Because writing an entirely new content management system is actually easier than figuring out how to use the mess that is Zope/Plone.
Re:Wiki works (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
You may personally dislike MediaWiki and Wikimedia, and that's fine, but it's no substitute for facts.
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Then I read the article and decided it would be not a good idea to do that.
Absolutely useless article, imo.
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Because it involves learning a new skillset (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because it involves learning a new skillset (Score:3, Funny)
Learning MediaWiki vs. learning Word or OOo? (Score:2)
Is learning MediaWiki really any harder than learning Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice.org Writer?
Re:Learning MediaWiki vs. learning Word or OOo? (Score:2)
Someone needs to bolt one of these AJAX Web 2.0 Beta platform browser-hosted swishy word processors to the editing stage.
/ On the subject of Office files bei
Re:Because it involves learning a new skillset (Score:3, Insightful)
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
I concur! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wiki (Score:3, Funny)
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Obligatory: (Score:2)
Re:Wiki (Score:2)
Infinite monkies... Infinite typewriters... Hamelet? Oh never mind.
Re:Wiki (Score:3, Funny)
I can seen this now.. (Score:5, Funny)
I can already see the productivity peaking =) (Score:2, Troll)
I can see how helpful it can be for a company.
Seriously though, a friend of mine actually did install a wiki under the same premises of the article. They are having lots of fun with it, but it hardly helped their workplace.
I welcome Wikis to my organization (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I welcome Wikis to my organization (Score:3, Interesting)
We've grown from being ~20 employees about a year ago to being just shy of 50 now (not counting external consultants).
We do spend face-to-face time on education, but the company wiki contains lots of information as well; and we really like the people who browse through it and ask questions regarding the material.
It's definitely a timesaver.
Nothing New (Score:2)
Its cool that this idea is put out, but I don't understand why this is such a big deal. It was on newsforge, linked from ITMJ, slashdot too? Yippy?
Re:Nothing New (Score:2)
worked for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:worked for me (Score:2)
*Yes, it would be easier to have it all stay in a designated library room, but then reality hits.
Re:worked for me (Score:2)
Semantic MediaWiki (Score:3, Informative)
Extensibility of MediaWiki (Score:4, Informative)
Don't expect to be able to extend or modify it easily. I've come to the conclusion that it would be easier to reimplement it than to modify it.
Re:Extensibility of MediaWiki (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Extensibility of MediaWiki (Score:2)
In action in our tech department... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In action in our tech department... (Score:2)
Re:In action in our tech department... (Score:2)
Re:In action in our tech department... (Score:2)
WTF? Give them their own damn password.
Man, security at your place of work must be really lax.
Re:In action in our tech department... (Score:2)
If you mean sharing servers passwords and what not, we store public PGP keys on the wiki and any passwords sent are sent by email encrypt
Re:In action in our tech department... (Score:2)
Uh, no. You have to be pretty high up on the geek scale to use a version control system. Unless you were forced into learning it while doing a computer science degree it's a pretty formidable thing.
"What makes version control systems (VCS) so great is this: lots of people can take your code, make little branches, and fiddle around with it in a distributed fashion. Then at some point, you get to merge it all back together in such a way that the VCS will seamlessly delete all the wrong bit
What's going on here...? (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. =)
Re:What's going on here...? (Score:2)
It uses the extension mechanism of parser hooks, it just uses it in the wrong place, Setup.php, w
Re:What's going on here...? (Score:2)
The {{foo}} (variables) syntax is possible to extend, but does not, as far as I have been able to tell, support parameters. So {{foo:...}} won't work. See the UserNameMagic extension for how to add a Med
Re: What's going on here...? (Score:2)
This article offers the insane learning curve of giving a really broad overview of why you'd use a wiki, then discussing how to develop it. Typically, the builtin configuration pages or existing plugins would go in between those.
How to compare Wikis (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How to compare Wikis (Score:2)
A couple months ago at my workplace, I proposed using a wiki in my group because we were having a lot of problems organizing our information and keeping it updated in a timely manner. My proposal was well received by the group and we went with Twiki , because it had already been setup by the IT department. Personally, I would not recommend twiki to anyone, because the syntax is horrible and the interface is very unintuitive (among a host of other downsi
Re:How to compare Wikis (Score:2)
Re:How to compare Wikis (Score:3, Interesting)
Company wikis (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, user education would help here, but there is only so much one can do... especially in a company of 30,000+ users.
While wikis certainly lower the bar for producing web content, there really needs to be some sort of way to prevent users from doing things that they don't particularly realize are (overall) harmful. Or at least much better training tools.
Wikis are evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Stable versions (Score:2)
Your "knowledge base" is your web site or documentation section.
And your web site or documentation section is a copy of wiki page versions chosen by your program's release crew. Release engineers search for the version of your page that most closely matches the behavior of the release branch and then copy that version to the publicly viewable site that uses the same wiki engine.
Re:Wikis are evil (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a well known fact in large organisations that knowledge management is a bastard. All those people trying to figure out how best to share information, some of them trying out wikis, and it turns out all they have to do is design a website and maintain a documentation section! They're going to feel pretty foolish when they realise it was so simple!
Seriously, get over yourself. There will be many cases where the employees of a company are capable of providing more content than those responsible for the w
Re:Wikis are evil (Score:2)
They work well when people want to share (Score:4, Interesting)
I've put into it design documentation, instructions for accessing our other services (e.g. Subversion repositories), troubleshooting tips, sequence diagrams of various race conditions, you name it. I try to periodically dump everything in my notes directory into the wiki. The effort of cleaning it up means I'll understand it later, having it on the wiki server means it's backed up regularly, and as a bonus, other people see it and don't need to ask me as many questions, so I can spend more time developing. And it gives people a way to still get answers when I'm off bicycling through Africa.
But collaboration technology like MediaWiki or bugzilla only works when people use it. There are always some people who won't play with others. If I put information on the wiki, they'll come bug me for it anyway. If I tell them it's on the wiki, they still won't read it. If I give them information verbally and specifically ask them to put it on the wiki, they won't do it. And then they wonder why I ignore their emails...
Re:They work well when people want to share (Score:2, Interesting)
Recently our IT people installed MediaWiki and I have been entering every bit of information I have to look up from other sources whilst trying to maintain a consistent structure.
I've talked a few other people into using it, but takeup is very slow even though I can s
Installed one last week! (Score:2)
Mixed results with our intranet wiki (Score:5, Interesting)
The wiki has succeeded in a couple of notable areas. The photo directory page is critical for learning new faces on a rapidly growing staff. Another page has completely replaced sticky-notes that were formerly used to coordinate certain tasks among staff and interns. The IT department has a lot of miscellaneous documentation pages. A few other pages serve the function of an electronic bulletin board for staff scattered across two buildings.
Management was very concerned at first that staff would abuse the wiki, either by wasting time posting trivia or by outright vandalism. Neither fear has materialized.
The biggest failure of the wiki is the number of abandoned pages. They don't do any harm, but about a third of pages are derelict, with old information that the author obviously lost interest in maintaining. Having a wiki editor might solve that problem, but in practice it doesn't rise to the level.
Re:Mixed results with our intranet wiki (Score:2)
We've been doing this for about a year (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a huge improvement on any previous method we've used to organise our documentation - mostly FAQs, instructions, process documentation, links to external resources, screenshots, all sorts. Apart from backups (VBSCript to take a MYSQL dump and copy the images directory), I use HTTrack to take a 1 link de
Does it come with a wafer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does it come with a wafer? (Score:2)
Did that at my company... (Score:3, Interesting)
The situation we used to work in was that we had a lot of customer information that changed quickly, a group of engineers who worked disparate hours (there was supposed to be someone available between 7AM and Midnight) and documentation that was scattered all over. We had a central repository for documentation, but it was the pits. You could only search on key words or categories, check-out and check-in procedures were laborious, if not counter-productive, and everything had to go through an approval cycle. Finally (and that, combined with the fact the repository was unsearchable, was kinda the nail in its coffin), reviews were partially based on how many entries you'd submit. The end result was an essentially unsearchable repository was filled to the bring with duplicate entries and outdated stuff.
Fed up with that, we created a Wiki on the side project. Initially I filled it myself with random things that I found useful. Then other people started using it. It wasn't perfect, but it was loads better than what we had - we could actually find information! Outdated stuff could be updated. People didn't have to call others at all hours of the night for server information anymore. And best of all, new hires could be pointed to it, and they could find useful starting information.
To give you an idea of how successful it was, it was initially completely disallowed by management, as it was creating a duplicate information store. The desktop server on which it was stored was yanked. But it stuck around, because people actually used it. Now, the entire group uses it for storing training, server, contact or any other information that a lot of people need and that changes often. Contrary to the commercial data storage software, it helps us do our job more efficiently.
Wikis are undeniably useful and loads better than anything else out there - if you make sure that the information you try to make accessible falls in the following categories:
- lots of different people can use it
- changes often
- lots of people can contribute to it
Oh, and it also helps if people aren't dicks, to use Wikipedia's rule.
Re: (Score:2)
Coursebook replacement (Score:2, Interesting)
We have started using a wiki to cooperatively develop materials for this course. We hope that it will ev
It works, and it needs FCKEditor (Score:2)
We did find FCKEditor http://www.fckeditor.net/ [fckeditor.net] but that doesn't come built-in and support is beta. Mention that to the system admins, and they'll refuse to install it. Once that
Lifehacker had something about this... (Score:2)
I tried this, and it worked quite well.
Which Wiki? (Score:2, Interesting)
(Semantic) MediaWiki on XAMPPLITE is easy (Score:2, Informative)
To start hacking on the awesome Semantic MediaWiki extensions [ontoworld.org], I downloaded XAMPPLITE (MySQL, PHP, Apache, and phpMyAdmin all nicely bundled for Windows) and the MediaWiki source. I had it up and running on Windows XP in 10 minutes!
For PHP development, I downloaded Eclipse and the PHPEclipse extension. I already had Cygwin and Vim installed, but I don't think you need them.
I've also used TWiki at work. The benefit of MediaWiki is the users' familiarity with Wikipedia.
Semantic MediaWiki adds attribut
using it here (Score:2)
Some useful add-ons we've used are:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924 [wikimedia.org] (a patch to have restrictions of namespaces to certain groups)
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug [wikimedia.org]
MediaWiki seems a strange choice for corporate use (Score:4, Insightful)
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 :) )
Re:MediaWiki seems a strange choice for corporate (Score:2)
Re:MediaWiki seems a strange choice for corporate (Score:2)
Very true, point taken.
In fact I did make that point in my doc. Something along the lines "al
Re:MediaWiki seems a strange choice for corporate (Score:2)
For this reason, we used the Perspective Wiki -- IIS based, uses integrated AD authentication. Probably not the greatest Wiki software, but in my opinion any system that requires another password is a system that people aren't going to want to use.
Wikis in Enterprises (Score:2, Informative)
Hopefully this information will be translated to english in the next 1-3 days.
unparalleled success (Score:2)
TWiki should be better for a corporate environment (Score:2, Interesting)
I've heard that a while ago, some folks inside Intel set up a mediawiki site for internal documentation, and when the lawyers heard about it, they had the project shut down. There was too much liability I gather.
Anyway, I've set up a TWiki installation at my work three years ago now and a
No standardized markup (Score:2)
Hopefully GUI editors will minimize this problem.
tiddlywiki (Score:2)
Eventually I found tiddlywiki [tiddlywiki.com].
Pros:
* no httpd required
* all information stored in a single html file (including the wiki code itself!)
* has tags and a search function
* monstrously quick and easy to set up.
Cons:
* haven't found any
Wikiphilia (Score:2)
I wonder if it's related to Morgellons [morgellons.org]?
Just don't use it as a doge for competence. (Score:2)
Probably written by someone who hasn't thought about it or tried it. In my experience Wiki's have the same fault of most other "management" software. Unless people must use it, it's a waste of time.
It's not typically the software's fault, it's the people. Managers are lazy/busy and resistant to change. Frankly most of them don't have the skill to organize a wiki
Re:Great! I can update the Overtime Policy. (edit) (Score:2)
NEW EDIT - by Employer
Overtime need not be paid out at all, with the employer providing no benefits.
Re:Great! I can update the Overtime Policy. (edit) (Score:2)
Re:Great! I can update the Overtime Policy. (edit) (Score:2)
Stable versions (Score:2)
Many would prefer a system in which info passes through several hierarchies before being published
Then let the hierarchy approve specific versions of each article that are copied to the world-visible web server. Remember that MediaWiki stores all previous versions of each article.
Re:PBH? (Score:2)
Re:Wiki and Work (Score:2)
Re:VA? (Score:2)
Slashdot is a part of/owned by OSTG, which is owned by VA Software. They used to state that this or that site was a part of the OSTG, but now, it seems that the VA (which, IIRC, stands for 'Value Added') brand has been brought back from the dead.
Re:Needs better Oracle support (Score:2)
If your organization is interested in sponsoring maintenance for Oracle support or in maintaining it yourself, please let us know. Thanks.
Re:Trying to setup a Wiki for this now! (Score:2)
Backup the db - if you're using mySQL, google for "phpmyadmin", install it and you'll find an easy way.
Re:Trying to setup a Wiki for this now! (Score:2)
For html - that depends. I don't know if there's any viable import facility; you may have to do it by hand. You'll want to strip some or all tags from your html files, maybe replace them with wiki tags for formatting. But remember that the actual data lives in a database, so with some programming you can load your data into the wiki's database directly, though this may involve modifying a