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

[James Mohr]

On Wednesday 26 July 2006 15:13, Mike Edenfield wrote:
> 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.

Although everyone who will be using our KB is tech-savvy, we also have similar 
problems.

> 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.

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

> 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.

Why are you using numbers? That is not very user friendly. Obviously it makes 
things easier of you are moving them from a another system or **must** be 
able to reference them by number. I know a lot of support organizations that 
tell you "See KB Article 47110815", so it is understandable.

What you should do here is use redirection, as Morten suggested. For example, 
KB47110815 article addressing creating an index in MS Word. You have an 
article "Create MSWord Index" which just contains this:

#REDIRECT [[KB47110815]]

When the using input the article title Create_MSWord_Index, they are 
automatically to the KB article. You could also create an artilce 
Create_Index_MSWord, etc which also redirect to the same KB article. That way 
you do not need to know what the author thought was the "best" name. Other 
places where we use redirection is things like "MS-Word" vs "Microsoft Word". 

Maybe in your case you should do it the otherway around, that is the KB 
article redirects to "real" article. That way, the full text is in the 
"human-readable" title and you can still reference the KB article by number. 
From what I have seen, the search does not find the article that just 
contains the redirection. (someone please correct me if I am wrong)

Another thing we did was to have the start part broken into cells, similar to 
the Wikipedia Main_Page. Each cell is a "top-level" category which then 
contains links to categories. 

What you need to remember is that not everyone looks for information in the 
same way and not everyone always looks for information in the same way. 
People use different search terms. Some like to search, some like to 
drill-down. Others like a way to simply jump to the right article. The 
MediaWiki will allow you to do all of these. 

> 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 am in the same boat and want to know what direction to go before I start 
out. However, I have learned that since each company is different, you are 
likely to need to do some things that you later toss out. 

> 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.

Another thing we are working on is the ability to create printable handbooks 
of various type. We have a contractual obligation to provide "datacenter 
handbooks" to several customers. Currently, we do them in MS-Word and create 
PDFs, which we send via email. We are working toward moving the data into the 
wiki and then pulling out specific articles for each customer. Our plan is to 
create a list of the pages in order that go into each handbook, pull them out 
of the wiki and then create the PDF.

I am very much interested in this topic, along with the general concept of 
knowledge management. I started a thread a few weeks ago that seemed to die 
out fairly quickly. I would enjoy continuing this discussion, (even in 
private) and maybe we can put together a wiki article about our experiences.

regards,

jimmo

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