Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Wikis

Recommendations for good private wiki platform?

Jacqueline — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:23:49 -0800

Please help me pick a wiki that isn’t icky. I need help finding a good private wiki platform for my organization (of ~500 people), to be used as a combination intranet / internal collaboration / knowledge management tool.

My 6-person team has been using ClearWiki and we love it. Unfortunately, (for legal reasons I won’t go into) before we can expand wiki use to our entire organization we need a wiki that can be hosted on our own server, on our own intranet, behind our firewall, but ClearWiki is only available as Software-as-a-Service. (I already asked ClearWiki if there was any way for us to buy a copy to host ourselves and they said no.)

So I need help finding something similar to ClearWiki that we can install on our own server.

Must-have features:
- Our webmaster says that it must run on PHP and PostgreSQL (first choice) or mySQL (second choice)
- WYSIWYG editor (instead of any sort of markup language/coding)
- Access control to individual pages can be set by user or groups of users
- Pages can accept file attachments
- Users can subscribe to individual pages to be notified of changes to those pages (preferably by email)
- Standard wiki revision history capability (records of who changed what when, ability to revert changes)
- Very very very user-friendly with a simple, clean interface (most of my coworkers are not very tech-savvy)

Nice-to-have features:
- Can organize pages with both folders and tags/labels
- Task management / to do lists
- Calendars (or ability to embed Google Calendars)
- Spreadsheets that are sortable and filterable (or ability to embed Google Spreadsheets)
- Wiki account is integrated with network account (so if someone is already logged into our network, they are also already logged in to their wiki account)

We have already considered/tested and rejected TikiWiki, BusinessWiki, and MediaWiki for being too complex/difficult for most people in our organization. There have been some discussions of getting SharePoint someday, but it won’t happen any time soon (if ever).

My own personal wiki knowledge/experience is only as a user – I’ve never installed a wiki platform before – so please forgive me if I’ve left out any important technical details. I’ll keep an eye on this thread throughout the day and answer any follow-up questions you may have.

Thanks!

A non-web website

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:40:28 -0800

HTML pages to link to files on a network drive? My manager wants to set up some html pages saved to the network drive for staff to use. These will link to frequently referred to documents so that we can organize and describe these documents in multiple ways. There are a lot of files, but they are being edited down from the full mass of what is kept on the network drive. This is instead of setting up a wiki on the company intranet. It's a bureaucratic maze attempting to get space there. Is this a pretty straightforward thing to do, or are we likely to run into trouble later on? It seems a little strange, but I could just be lacking in imagination in my ability to think of workarounds. Is there a better non-web-based solution? In other words, google sites is not an option. Also, maybe this is obvious already, but I have very limited techie skills.

How to track wiki startups?

teracloth — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:55:31 -0800

Where might I find evidence that there was a surge of wiki startups circa 2005, which has since tapered off? This is just a hunch I have, but if it's true, I'd like to use the argument in a job application I'm preparing.

My dream would be to find an annual list of "100 hot startups" from Business 2.0 or some such magazine. I could then count how many of those were wiki-related. But I haven't found such a list.

Does anyone know of something like that? Can anyone suggest an alternative methodology?

Web 2.0 in Education

man down under — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:58:50 -0800

EducationFilter: How do you use wikis, blogs and social media in the classroom? I am interested to hear how educators use wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and other forms of social media. I personally use some web 2.0 sites and applications, like wetpaint and bubbl.us but am wondering if I am missing some good opportunities?

Have any teachers had good experiences using things like MySpace (eugh!), Facebook or Twitter to provide authentic and meaningful learning?

I'm not interested in using anything just for the sake of it...Sound pedagogical input only please!

Thanks in advance, Mefites.

Looking for wiki-type software that does the heavy lifting automatically

scrm — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:21:36 -0800

I'm hunting for a 'smart' knowledge management system for an organisation, to write documentation collaboratively. It should be able to receive information in multiple ways, categorize it automatically, and publish it to a webpage. Kinda like an intelligent mashup of Evernote and wiki software like Mediawiki and Dokuwiki.

Ideally, the system would have the following:

Support for input from multiple users

Multiple input methods. Ideally email (like Evernote), or a simple one-line form that interprets entries (like the Google Calendar 'Quick add' box)

Automatic categorizing of information based on keywords. So if the output document has several sections, the system will know automatically what input to put where

The ability to output the results on a webpage, and to customize how they look

A close-to-zero learning curve. The people who will use it aren't technical so it has to be straightforward

A low price tag

Any ideas or am I just dreaming? All pointers much appreciated.

Knowledge Management, obsolete??

Xurando — Fri, 26 May 2006 07:04:08 -0800

Does Knowledge Management have any validity as a professional field of expertise or have internal wikis made it obsolete? I am consulting to a large (30, 000 person) organization that is seeing a large turnover as half of its workforce is, soon to retire, baby boomers. Although a lot of the expertise in this organization is technical in nature, most of it is specialized and anecdotal in nature. Most of the anecdotal knowledge will be lost without a knowledge management strategy.

I know Knowledge Management was a big deal about 6 years ago but seems to have disappeared off the map. Have wikis made it moot? The organization is looking at knowledge management strategies and as decided that an internal wiki will be the answer to their problem. I have argued that a wiki is just a small part of a knowledge management strategy and that they should look at several options beside wikis.

What tools should they be looking at beyond wikis? Is there a case that can be made for knowledge management as field of professional expertise?

Wiki-based portfolios?

tpl1212 — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:25:54 -0800

Using a wiki (media wiki) to display a portfolio...ideas, best practices, plug-ins, doodads, or hoohas? We use a MediaWiki wiki at work for an informal pseudo intranet, with sections created for each department, projects, brainstorming, etc.

As the designer, I figured a nice (and potentially simple) way to create an internal portfolio of interface design ideas would be to place mock-ups on the wiki...thing is, i'm having a hard time conceptualizing how that would be done (and done well).

All i'd need to do would be to place .jpg or .gif images on the wiki, perhaps organized by project name or date or something (not well thought out)...like a typical portfolio. I've never been terribly fond of the standard "file upload" wiki proceedure, so I was wondering if there was something...better...or more robust...that I could implement?

Can you point me to any clever wiki-based portfolio implementations? Or maybe some tools that would play well with a wiki (perhaps something like...Gallery)?

Thanks!

Blogging and wiki use on intranets

TheDonF — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 13:39:05 -0800

Do you work for a medium or large company? Does your company have an intranet? Does it use blogging tools and wikis? If so.... I'm an intranet developer and am almost certain that introducing small-scale (initially) blogging to give better communication and more immediate feedback from the business to the authors would be a good thing. I'm also fairly convinced that using Wikis would help alleviate much of the "necessity" to store endless Office documents in shared drives. My colleagues aren't quite so sure and are concerned that the openess of the Wiki format, that anyone can edit a document, there's virtually no version control and it could be dangerous because it would lead to non-experts updating content incorrectly which others would use to a potentially damaging effect. With the blogging, they're afaid that standards of written communication would drop. To be fair some of the wiki ones are, I believe, legimate concerns.

I really need some help in gathering evidence, good and bad, of the use of these formats on an intranet. So, was it good for you or was it horrible mistake? How did you implement it or how has your company implemented it for you? Tales of joy and woe, I'll take them all!

Recomendations for a simple comment/response application

Grod — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:17:50 -0800

I need a really basic web application that functions similar to a blog system but isn't. All I want is to create a single page with a question to which I will invite people to respond. I've considered using a wiki, but I don't want anyone to be able to edit anyone elses response. I'd also like to be able to sort responses based on a few required fields (but this isn't essential). I can just create a second Wordpress install with only 1 post, but that seems like overkill. I figure this could probably be done with php or perl (and therefore probably has been done). It doesn't need to look fancy, either, something as basic as what you're looking at now would be fine—although, I wouldn't mind being able to break it up into several pages if the page gets long.

Personal wiki show-n-tell

daver — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 14:43:35 -0800

America! Show us your wikis! After hearing how many of you (2) are using wikis for personal content, is anybody willing to show off what they've done on their own wikis? Any cool wikis you'd link to as good examples? I'm mostly interested in examples of how folks are using Wiki's all by themselves, but if you've got a particularly good wiki that's collective I'd love to know.

Note: No restrictions apply to nationalities of the postees. Offer encouraged where permitted. No animals were harmed in the creation of this post.

Where can I interact with people interested UI design for group blogs?

Gyan — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 15:52:09 -0800

Is there an interactive site, preferably a wiki, where people can suggest & discuss community-blog design & features? (more inside) I've a novice programmer who's currently halfway through a Scheme course (although I've aced college C courses and worked through most of K&R). Sounds ambitious, but I'm planning for my first learning project to be a group blog, like this one, using {Perl | PHP} & MySQL.

I've plenty of ideas for feature sets and UI. Some of them are undoubtedly naive/idealistic/inefficient, some ubiquitous and some good & unique. Where can I interact with people who are discussing these kinds of issues?