WikiMedia

[Willemina]

I have been asked to make a wiki for my company. It will be an internal program for us to use. We have about 1000 employees who will be updating it. Is MediaWiki as used by Wikipedia the most suitable for this purpose? It says on their website that it is not recommended for small scale sites, but I'm not sure what small scale is. 1000 people seems like a lot to me, but Wikipedia has a lot more users than that. And if not MediaWiki, then what do people recommend?

[ryanhellyer]

Hi Willemina,

I quite like the MediaWiki engine, but like you said, it is often not recommended for smaller scale enterprizes. I heard once that there is a lot of code behind it which is purely there for making sure it works with HUGE traffic, ie: it works across multiple servers etc. I'm not sure if that is true or not though.

At my work, our computer admin installed WikkaWiki for us to try out, but so far I'm not impressed. It has lots of things which I consider bugs - although they are intentionally designed into the software.

It seems that Wiki software simply isn't as well developed as forums and blogs are.

The main thing we need at my work, is an idiot proof system which people don't need to be taught how to use. If someone needs to remember something to use it, they probably wont! So the most important thing off all, is that the software is 100% intuitive. Some of the wiki programs out there are far from intuitive and even good old Wikipedia fails in some ways due to know special Wiki code to achieve certain effects.

[Willemina]

At my work, our computer admin installed WikkaWiki for us to try out, but so far I'm not impressed. It has lots of things which I consider bugs - although they are intentionally designed into the software.

What sort of bugs?

It seems that Wiki software simply isn't as well developed as forums and blogs are.

Why would it not be as well developed? Do you think that programmers are less interested in Wikis? Or is it because there is less money in developing them?

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by Willemina

What sort of bugs?

For example, titles must not have spaces in them, you have to use captial letters to denote a new word. You also have to be very particular about the way you code unordered and ordered lists or they mess up. WikiMedia doesn't have these problems.

Originally Posted by Willemina

Why would it not be as well developed? Do you think that programmers are less interested in Wikis? Or is it because there is less money in developing them?

I guess this is because Wikis are less common. Everyone knows about Wikipedia, but that is only one site. There just aren't that many wikis around in comparison to blogs and to a lesser extent forums. I guess developers are just more likely to work on something which is likely to get used, and blogs and forums are it.

[ryanhellyer]

Here is a useful list of Wiki softwares ... Comparison of wiki software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've tried WikkaWiki, Wikiwig and Particle Wiki.

Wikiwig was my pick of the bunch as it seemed to be more user friendly than the others.

[Willemina]

Thank you Ryan

[ryanhellyer]

I've been poking around the WikiWig forum. It isn't particularly encouraging when the developers of a supposedly high tech piece of web based software can't reconfigure their forum to avoid an onslaught of spam :P

EDIT: it seems that the software has been abandoned, or at least there is only one developer who is only doing simple bug fixes on it.

[Draicone]

1000 users who will be regularly updating is reasonably high traffic. Most MediaWiki-powered sites don't have anywhere near that many regular users. However, you may find that corporate/commercial wikis are more appropriate for your company; have a look at Confluence if you're interested.