[thelist] wiki

[Stuart Young]

Hi,

I have recently customised a mediawiki to use for internal organisation
development.

I recommend that you do NOT use a wiki unless you are prepared to "fill
it in" with lots of structure, and good practice and help files. A wiki
that is a blank space waiting for input will be a disaster - if people
actually use it and insert some material they will create a poor
structure (inconsistent, clashing, duplication, etc).

> first impression is that they are confusing, 

Yes, the users of the wiki found it very confusing. To reduce confusion
I have done the following:
* made a whole lot of Help pages. Typically these are much cut down
versions of MediaWiki and Wikipedia help files with links to the full
version. They try to be very simple.
* added friendly instructional messages to the pages - I used templates
to acheive this. Can simply type {{templatename}} and the content of
that template gets inserted. Things like "please sign your posts, if you
are logged in you can sign by simply typing ~~~~" These would have links
to Help pages.
* filled out the site with good practice - i.e. entered my contact
details, made my user page, uploaded my photo - all of these link to
Help on why and how you should register as a user, create a user page,
upload your photo
* filled out the pages with blank info, e.g. "Your Name here" - then
users can simply copy the whole block of code and edit the text parts.
* created a style guide - suggested good practice for page formatting
and page titling - these contain the code snippets that they can copy.
* created "request a job" pages - these assume that general users will
never be able to do floated divs or add images to pages even if you
supply them with the wikicode to copy. So allow them to request that any
knowledgeable person will do that for them - also created request a job
pages for things that only admins can do like 
* created Categories to link different pages. Added all of those pages
to the correct categories.
* ran it as a beta test with IT-savvy users before letting general
users near it. Tore hair out when IT-savvy users were incapable of
following good formatting or information architecture practice or
copying code.
* still to do - changes to the interface - will need to hack the
backend files - a few usability problems with the page layout have come
to light after the beta test.

The whole entering all the information work took about a week in total
(although I was researching how to use wiki's at the same time and
learning all these lessons). 

> smashed together capitalized words and barely structured pages. 

you don't have to have capitalised words or WordsJoinedTogether. You
can happily have spaces and puntuation in your page titles.

> It would be nice to be able to insert images or SVG into the
document, 

This is easy see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Images_and_other_uploaded_files 

cheers


Dr Stuart Young,       +64 (0)9-815 4321 Ex 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz>     
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
http://tinyurl.com/4956o
The official URL for my staffpage is too long and complex