[Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki as a "Knowledge Base"

[Morten Blaabjerg]

Re: 2. I do not have a solution to the seach results issue - but it seems 
the problem is, you would like each page to have "several" titles. Perhaps 
you could use a workaround for this, using namespaces, categories or 
templates.

For instance, you could make extensive use of redirects, with both knowledge 
base numbers and titles all pointing to a canonical page, which has both the 
knowledge base number and the title in its pagename; one or the other 
paranthesized, or with a colon in between. That way pages using either link 
will all point to the same page, and pages displayed in the search results 
will show both number and title in the complete pagename.

Best wishes,
Morten :-)

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Edenfield" <kutulu at kutulu.org>
To: <mediawiki-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 3:13 PM
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki as a "Knowledge Base"


> Hello,
>
> I am trying to convince my company to use MediaWiki for our public
> knowledge base, and so far our test setup has been working well.
> However, I'm running into two major stumbling blocks, both of which seem
> to be inherent to how the Wiki works, and I'm hoping someone else has
> found solutions for them, or can at least help us do so.
>
> 1. Creating articles is someone unintuitive, since there is no "Create A
> New Article" page.  So far everyone that's added articles has know how
> to construct the proper URL, but we want to streamline the process a
> bit.  I'm pretty sure I can just write a new special page extension that
> does this automatically, but if anyone else has a similar and/or better
> solution, I'm all for it.
>
> 2. The bigger problem is with the search results.  Our articles were
> added to the wiki with their title being the knowledge base number.
> However, we want the search results to show both this number, and a
> "title" (which is usually the question or error the article is about).
> Right now, when someone searches for articles they only see the few
> lines of context around the search word, and this is often not enough to
> differentiate between similar articles.
>
> I have no problems writing code to make these things happen, and
> submitting it back to the community.  (I've already cleared this with my
> employer.)  But I also don't want to rush into mediawiki coding blind,
> and what I want to do seems beyond the scope of most tutorials.  I've
> read up on creating extensions, and creating your own markup, but I
> suspect I will need to make big changes to the existing pages, possibly
> even the database schema, to achieve everything we need.
>
> I'm hoping someone else has done something similar, and can either
> direct us where to find and install it, or at least point me in the
> right direction for writing it myself.
>
> --Mike
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