[Mediawiki-l] corporate wiki: success factors?

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Fri Nov 24 14:02:04 UTC 2006


On 24/11/06, Frederik Dohr <FDG001 at gmx.net> wrote:

> However, predictably, many of my colleagues are quite skeptical - and to be honest, so am I to some extent.
> Now I hope to benefit from the experts' experience on this mailing list:
> a) How can I motivate my colleagues to at least try it out - and hopefully realize that it might actually be a great help to them?
> b) What's required in terms of basic structure? Certainly some help pages for explaining the wiki syntax (though I'll probably link to Wikipedia rather than create it from scratch), but I'm sure there are a couple of other things to increase acceptance and participation.


The aim of a corporate wiki is, instead of "oh, Bob did that for two
years, but he left last week ... I wonder how he did it", to be able
to say "Bob did that for two years, he left how-to notes on the wiki."

How is your office culture? If you have a secretive office culture -
where people guard knowledge through fear - a wiki won't fix that.


> Due to the large variety of projects people here are working on, it would be very hard to create a comprehensive basic structure right from the start. So I'll have to rely on the users/colleagues to create a kind of self-organizing wiki.


Where I work has a *lot* of internal wikis. Mostly they work per
group. I write up something on any process, procedure or in-house
application I have to use a lot, as notes to *myself* and others.

You know how a lot of people start a new job by getting a notebook and
writing everything in it? The wiki should be used for that. It's
EVERYONE'S COLLECTIVE NOTEPAD.

The actual wiki software hardly matters. MediaWiki is very easy to use
and install, but a bit heavyweight for a small team; it also doesn't
even try to do access control. My work has various installations of
MoinMoin, TWiki, MediaWiki, UseMod, Trac ... my group uses MoinMoin
because it uses flat files rather than a database, and it's only used
by ten people, so MediaWiki was a bit fat for the job.


> Any input on this issue would be greatly appreciated!
> (Hopefully you won't mind if I incorporate those suggestions into my paper as well.)


If there isn't a wiki on how to use corporate wikis, you should start one ;-D


- d.



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