Re: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki

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.

Comment on Re: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
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]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re^2: Tricks for Maintaining a Wiki
by starX (Chaplain) on Jan 18, 2007 at 21:01 UTC

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]