Hi Yury,

hi folks,

first: thank you for your initiative. The crazy thing about MediaWiki is, that it is used in thousands of companies and organizations. But in the Wikimedia ecosystem the vendor sector and the zone of third-party users are for some reasons underdeveloped, especially in comparison with other open source projects. Say Joomla! or Drupal.
So we (Hallo Welt!, Germany) would appreciate, if there are more MediaWiki companies and more MediaWiki developers, cooperating with each-other, because this helps everybody and it boosts the Wikimedia universe and the wiki ideas.

Anyway we (Hallo Welt) have a bundle of success stories, we can and we will share with you. A few are even published on our weblog (but unfortunately in German). In a first step I will answer the questions in general.

- What was the project about? 

Most of our projects are internal wikis. The classical use case is any sort of documentation and quality assurance (the Germans….). The demand for public wikis is increasing, but in the public sphere budgets are always very low.  That means: Wikis for commerce and industry are very important for us.

- Who was the customer? Was it an open project? 

I don’t know, what you understand as “open” project? Customers came from everywhere. But there are some difficult sectors: finance industry, education and the public sector. But maybe this is only our experience. Some others probably have their success just in this fields.

- What the community looked like? Where those people on the wiki came from? 

Even if the company or organization need a wiki, they often don’t know it. They are looking for document management system or other types of software.
Mostly a single person (the maintainer), see that for their use case wiki is an alternative or the right way. And he or she (!) has to fight internally for this solution. In the end, the users, the employees are always happy with it.

- Why you've chosen MediaWiki and not another solution? 

Most famous software, high acceptance, leading open source wiki software - in my opinion. The only alternative to Atlassians Confluence. Dokuwiki, FOSS, TWIKI, Confluence and others is great software. Good work. But MediaWiki is ahead for knowledge management and documentation solutions

- Did you program anything additional for MediaWiki, did you integrate with some other services and applications? 

The BlueSpice MediaWiki Enterprise Distribution. We’d love to open this project for developers, partners and reseller. And we start, if somebody is asking for it.
We have some bridges to StatusNet microblogging software, Microsoft SharePoint. In two projects we have integrated MediaWiki and ELGG.

- Or maybe you've elaborated some tricky methodology? 

Oh. We have made several standardizations. But this is a question for our technical head J

- How did the project change the life of your customer? 

If a company or an organization has introduced MediaWiki you can hardly kill it. It will become part of your daily live.

- Was the community motivated? How active they were? 

You never can motivate. There is motivation or not. The only thing you can do is destroying motivation. And the most companies are very successful in doing that.

- Did you provide any kind of support and consulting? 

Consulting, project management, development, migration, skinning support and maintenance…

- Maybe you've provided admins, moderators, facilitators? How did you teach them? 

Via Workshops and telephone conferences.

- Did you have any trainings? 

User and admin trainings

- Anything about money? $-) 

J The wide range from 5.000 Euro up to 150.000 Euro. But the average project in Germany has a value of 10 to 30.000 Euro. Sounds a lot. For software project it isn’t. We have 14 hungry employees… with families, children, parents ….

- What obstacles and difficulties have you faced? 

1. Years ago customers always compare MediaWiki with Confluence or they have an expensive SharePoint project.

2. Wiki never have the highest priority for CEOs. CRM or ERP solutions are always ahead.

3. No time for working with the wiki.

- How much time did you spend on a different stages of your project? 

First contact until project start: half year  (average). Some came round after two years.

Planning: on/two  months

Installation, Customizing: depends

- In general: was it worth it? 

Yes, always. But: We need much more technical standardization. Extension management! Testing and customizing extensions take time. Too much in my opinion.

Greetings!

Richard Heigl