Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki

starX has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I opened my mouth and suggested that my company move its in house documentation to a wikimedia-based wiki, and now I'm finding myself in charge of the project. Basic data entry being "complete," I'm trying to figure out how to do some things that might make maintaining it a little bit easier (for example, I've already written a script to monitor the database and send me an email when a page is getting "out of date"). After poking around the Wikimedia Foundation Developer Hub, I'm finding myself at a bit of a loss for other projects that I might want to automate.

I know the adage goes that if it ain't broke don't fix it, but I'm interested in preventative maintenance. If anyone in the monastery has any experience using/maintaining one of these and would be willing to share some of their experiences, problems, solutions, and resources I would surely appreciate it.

Thanks much.

Update: I thought I might share the script I mentioned above for those who find themselves in a similar position. See here.

Comment on Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki

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Re: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by j3 (Friar) on Jan 18, 2007 at 21:08 UTC
My only suggestion is to consider making sure you can export the pages wholesale if for some reason you later need to change wiki engines, or change to some other format entirely. Dunno whether or not wikimedia does export. Actually, just easy access to the plain text files (containing the source docs) is what I'd really want (note, some wiki's store that in db tables). Personally, I'd make sure the wiki allows Markdown markup, and then use that exclusively. It's probably the simplest and most readable markup style, and there's plenty of implementations of it around (Perl, Ruby, PHP,...).	[reply]
Re^2: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by starX (Chaplain) on Jan 18, 2007 at 22:13 UTC
MediaWiki stores in MySQL on our system, but I bet having the ability to do a text dump of every article is something that could potentially come in handy if we do decide to go with a different engine, and I'd wager Perl would be good at it too. Thanks!	[reply]
Re: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by madbombX (Hermit) on Jan 18, 2007 at 20:22 UTC
Depends on what you mean by easy. I too suggested the same thing for my company and found myself in charge of the project. There are a bunch of variables here. Which version are you using? Are you having the author's "watch" their articles? Are you putting other's in charge of "patrolling" content? Are you using the built-in "Special Pages" for monitoring and categorizing, etc, etc? ie. Are you using the full core functionality of the wiki (which in my experience is pretty powerful). What specifically are you looking to do that the wiki cannot out of the box? The biggest problem that I came across was getting non-technical folks to use the wiki to store their process data (daily routines, duties, etc) in case of their absence, the train wouldn't stop. Once I put together a page on Wiki markup and gave a few mini classes, I was fine. Other than that, just getting people to do their end was the challenging part. The wiki does most of the work itself.	[reply]
Re^2: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by starX (Chaplain) on Jan 18, 2007 at 21:01 UTC
Everyone has the option of watching their own pages, but no one is responsible for content at the moment. The thinking behind the monitor script was that we would want to check & verify the data every few months to make sure it is still accurate (we use another piece of software that goes through constant revisions). The MediaWiki version is 1.8.2 I check in on the special pages every now and again to see what I can be doing to clean up, but I've been looking to automate when possible. For example, my next project is a script that will do a regexp search using the titles of articles, match them against the text of articles, and create a wiki link on the first instance of a match in the text of an article. Some people are very comfortable making edits on the fly, and some are not, but just about everyone around here loves it (our old help system had no search ability). I've already made up some simple instructions for editing, and we've shown it off to everyone, and while the theory is that everyone will be doing the editing, in practice it's going to come down to myself and a few others, and anyway I can make the machine do the work is helpful; especially if it's work I need to repeat across every article in there.	[reply]
Re: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by perrin (Chancellor) on Jan 18, 2007 at 21:07 UTC
TIP #1: Back it up. Then if someone goes nuts and deletes all your pages, you can get them back.	[reply]
Re^2: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by starX (Chaplain) on Jan 18, 2007 at 22:09 UTC
The very nice thing about the MediaWiki model is that it maintains its own revision history, so if someone does go nuts and start deleting pages, then it's pretty simple to revert. In our case it is, in this incarnation, a strictly in-house thing, so I imagine if someone did start deleting pages willy nilly our GM, who is one of the biggest contributors, would be none too pleased with them. Yes, the machine backs up its database regularly in case of catastrophic	[reply]
Re: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki by jdporter (Paladin) on Jan 18, 2007 at 21:14 UTC
Here's a related recent thread, though it didn't get a lot of activity either. A word spoken in Mind will reach its own level, in the objective world, by its own weight	[reply]