[Mediawiki-l] Hello, newbie here.

[Thomas Dalton]

On 25/01/2008, Cindy Livengood <cmlivengood at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear List Members,
>
> I'm new to this list and new to the wiki admin stuff.  I need to start a
> wiki for my school.  I'm not a programmer, but I will learn anything I a
> need to learn.
>
> I need it for both the public use and intra-organizational use of the
> district I teach in, so some things will require a user log-in and others
> won't.
>
> I have noticed there are several places to download wiki from, but I need to
> know what would be the best package to download that would be the easiest
> for me to set up with minimal programming requirements.
>
> Any URLs and advice you can offer a newbie would be greatly appreciated.

Do you really expect anyone to suggest anything other than Mediawiki
on the Mediawiki mailing list? ;)

The only wiki I have any experience of running (as opposed to just
using) is Mediawiki, so I can't say if any others might be easier. You
say you aren't a programmer, do you at least have experience of
running websites? If not, I would suggest you learn with a simple
website before trying anything as complicated as a wiki (while it's
all going well, you shouldn't need much knowledge of websites, but
things will go wrong eventually and you'll need to know what you're
doing to fix it - especially as it's a work thing, not just for fun).
If you know how to run a website, just not how to program, you should
be able to cope with Mediawiki, as long as you don't want to do
anything non-standard.

One thing I would suggest - don't try and use one wiki split between
public and private use, Mediawiki certainly isn't set up to work like
that (you can do it, but it isn't easy or reliable), and I doubt any
other wikis are either. You would be much better off running two
separate wikis - with Mediawiki you can set up interwiki links which
make it extremely easy to link between the two (in the same way
Wikipedia links between different languages). Then you can have one
wiki public and one private, which is pretty easy to set up.

All the information you should need to set up Mediawiki is available
at www.mediawiki.org