Hi everyone!
Now it's my turn to answers those questions... Our company is called WikiVote and our main business is law-crowdsourcing. This has nothing to do with MediaWiki except for the experience in voting/ranking algorithms and questions of participant motivation.
Now we have 4-5 people to work on (Semantic) MediaWiki projects and our goal is to apply semantic technologies in very unexpected, complex and interesting fields.
== Directions == We now have three main directions: 1) Knowledge bases and knowledge engineering. Here SMW helps a lot with supporting the consistency of the base. 2) Foresights and strategy planning. If you have a bunch of representatives from some industry and they want to predict/arrange how this field will be developing during the next 15 years, you need a tools and methodologies to create collaborative roadmaps. That's what we do. 3) Standardization. We're now experimenting with professional standards. 4) Education. The people in education typically don't have a lot of money, but we try to help interesting wiki projects by supporting them and providing our extensions.
== Customers == Enterprises (like Sber-bank), associations of professionals, potentially government.
== Community ==
The wiki-authors are mostly employees of the companies or company representatives if we work with a project where many companies are involved. They're typically motivated but sometimes are not technical-savvy: so in our skin we got rid of 60% of MediaWiki buttons to make the interface lighter :-D One of the problems with the community is that not everyone get the idea that in wiki you can really edit something, not just comment on it.
== Trainings, courses ==
We haven't yet provided any kinds of training. Typically we record a screencast about how to use the wiki-tool. However some of the projects become sophisticated and we'll probably going to teach our customers.
== Public results == As for now our project are not open to the world, but we try to release our extensions. Now we only have Extension:CollaborationDiagram property described and accessible :( but there's a lot of voting, semantic and skin extension that just don't have proper documentation to be released in open source. We want to be better in our relations with Open Source Community, really!
I'm trying to make screencasts about Semantic MediaWiki and semantic extensions, here is the one: http://www.ykatkov.name/2012/12/02/page-schemas-screencast/
----- Yury Katkov, WikiVote
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Yury Katkov katkov.juriy@gmail.com wrote:
Hi guys!
Can anybody tell about the success story you've had with MediaWiki? If you're not a good writer, here is the list of interesting questions. Of course you can describe your story without looking at them.
- What was the project about?
- Who was the customer? Was it an open project?
- What the community looked like? Where those people on the wiki came from?
- Why you've chosen MediaWiki and not another solution?
- Did you program anything additional for MediaWiki, did you integrate with
some other services and applications?
- Or maybe you've elaborated some tricky methodology?
- How did the project change the life of your customer?
- Was the community motivated? How active they were?
- Did you provide any kind of support and consulting?
- Maybe you've provided admins, moderators, facilitators? How did you teach
them?
- Did you have any trainings?
- Anything about money? $-)
- What obstacles and difficulties have you faced?
- How much time did you spend on a different stages of your project?
- Do you have any open results? The project itself, the skins, extensions,
papers, articles, photos of the happy users?
- What have you learnt from the project?
- In general: was it worth it?
Cheers, Yury Katkov, WikiVote