Re: [Mediawiki-l] Mediawiki as coroparate knowledge database - questions :)

On Friday 18 August 2006 23:00, Rob Church wrote: Why? I though about doing something similar, albiet with different types of documents, but I could not come up with a good reason for different name spaces. The only cases I could come up with is when you have a spec, install guide and project plan all with the same name. Each document can still be grouped if id had a category of the respective type, i.e. [[Category:Checklist]]. As far as I see it, creating and managing the extra namespaces is unneed work, so I am curious as to what benefits you see. We have different customers and we want to limit the access they have. That is, each customer can access only information that is specific to their systems. However, the datacenter people can access any customer information. As far as I can see, separate namespaces is the easiest way to do that. One problem I see here is you have namespaces for document types and namespaces for the category of use who access it. This potentially gives you: techie_checklist user_checklist techie_project_plan user_project_plan etc... So, you end up with M x N name spaces. This brings us back to the question of why is it necessary to have different name spaces for each document type? Be careful of the word "template" in the WikiMedia-World. A template here is a file that it is included automatically in another. If you are looking for pre-define text (Vorlagen) then that is something different. We have different starting text for different kinds of documents, although we did not break them down as separate namespaces, each has standard text blocks. When someone access a new page, they are given the list of document types and they select the most appropriate one. What we did was implement the multiple starting page hack. That is, when the user inputs a new article title and the article does not exist, the user is given a choice of about 10 different types of new articles to create (e.g customer, hardware, application, troubleshooting, etc.). When the use clicking on the link the start page is a template with a set of default sections that are required for the give article type. There is also a "page info" section at the bottom, which includes things like creation date, creator, review date and so forth. We also have comments in the templates to explain things to the user. Also each of these article types have categories automatically included in the templates. When the article is created, the categories are added. The details of the hack are here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multiple_starting_text_hack There is also a list specifically for using the MediaWikie as a knowledge base: http://groups.google.com/group/mediawiki-as-knowledgebase regards, jimmo -- --------------------------------------- "Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are." -- John Wooden --------------------------------------- Be sure to visit the Linux Tutorial: http://www.linux-tutorial.info