On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Branden Visser branden@uwindsor.ca wrote:
We're considering hosting MediaWiki for an institution of approximately 16,000 users. We're wondering what costs (monetary or employee-hours) others have experienced in a similar deployment.
Currently we're looking at a relatively light single-use (say, 50 concurrent users peak), but are considering a more enterprise deployment in the future that could host documentation for more projects and see more activity.
Any additional advice or lessons learned about similar deployments is also very welcome.
Since MediaWiki is designed for concurrent use by hundreds of *millions* of people, it should have no problem handling an internal wiki of any size. If you don't install any poorly-written extensions or enable any crazy options or have multi-megabyte pages or whatever, It should scale fine to your workloads if you just throw it on a spare machine with commodity hardware that's not too busy. Probably best to pick a machine that has decent CPUs.
As for administration, if you have LAMP or equivalent installed somewhere, it should take a few minutes to do a basic setup (from a technical perspective, not counting any organizational procedures you might need to go through). If you want to adjust its behavior a lot, of course, you can spend unlimited amounts of time adjusting and hacking it. MediaWiki is targeted primarily at public wikis like Wikipedia, not corporate intranets, so you might find you want to change a lot of things, I don't know.
Anyway, this list is used mainly by MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia sysadmins, not third-party/corporate users. You could try asking at the mwusers.com forum, or some place like that, for an answer from someone who's actually in a similar situation to you.