In practice, we have found this doesn't work well
for us (with
thousands of employees).
Yeah, our company doesn't have thousands of employees :-)
Each department winds up writing its own wiki page
about the same
topic (say, Topic X), and they're all different.
So it means most of your departments work on something very similar?
Probably we don't have this problem because our departments and
projects strongly differ, so everyone just writes their specific
articles to their own wikis and general information to the primary
"CustisWiki".
We have ~7 wikis for the whole company (~200 employees).
Users don't know which one is the "real"
or "right" article.
We find it better to have one central wiki with one definitive
article per topic.
No redundancy, no coupling, and no version skew between wikis.
Just an idea - you can also setup the replication process between wikis
to ease fighting
Thanks, I'll check it out. Categorization can get
very complicated on
a MediaWiki system though.
Consider this fairly simple template example:
{{#if:{{{department|}}} | [[Category:{{{department}}} projects]]}}
I would be amazed if any global search-and-replace could handle this!
Such examples of course are much harder, but if there is not much
chaos, you can handle it with regexps... Not a task for an average user,
but he can ask someone who knows regexps to do it :-)
With our extension, the Excel spreadsheet is rendered
"live" in the
wiki page.
Ooh, I see, of course it's a big feature!
Also another question - didn't you try to use some automation using
excel itself to save xls as an html?
We started looking into Semantic MediaWiki - it has
impressive
features.
But we got scared off by stories that it slows down the
wiki too much. Maybe we should give it another look.
As someone already said, it should not affect performance noticeably if
you don't abuse it.
And also, even if use abuse it - it has a very good feature: "concept
caching", i.e. caching of semantic query results with correct
invalidation (as I understand it has some limitations though).
(
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Concept_caching)
Overall, it's very nice to see that a big company like yours has
successful MediaWiki usage experience (I assume it's successful, yeah?
:))
Do you have any extensions or modifications that you would like to make
public & free & open source? Or maybe you even already did it with
something? :-)