Callum Wilson
Just rolled out a mediawiki based wiki for the IT department of a large UK based insurance/assurance company - it included the following extensions:
- LDAP Authentication Extension to authenticate users against the corporate Active Directory.
- SpecialUserScore Extension to encourage staff to contribute to the wiki by showing the "top contributors"
- ASHighlight Extension to allow users to add syntax highlighted code segments to the wiki articles.
- Dynamic Article List extension that shows the hotest poages and the recent discussions.
- Sort2 Extension, simple sorter of lists
See my discussion page on how to work with company LDAP number-based usernames
Overview
editThe business case for doing this was that this IT dept have a large project share of large word documents and a distributed location development model. Basically, no one could find any useful documentation.
In order to get critical mass for the wiki, it was pre-fed by a consultant (moi) with 200 odd articles covering:
- Organisation Logical data model - so that all future articles can link to the terminology used in the business.
- user guides for various things
- some quality standards for coding
- and about 10 or so pages showing how to use the wiki itself.
This is not an enormous wiki but hopefully these figures will help your business case if you are planning to do this in your organisation:
| Quarter | Articles | Page Views | Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008-08 | 2000 | - | - |
| 2009-02 | 2500 | 200,000 | 200 |
| 2009-06 | 3100 | 250,000 | 212 |
| 2009-09 | 3400 | 288,000 | 225 |
| 2010-01 | 3650 | 320,000 | 234 |
| 2010-04 | 3879 | 347,000 | 243 |
| 2010-07 | 4091 | 382,809 | 255 |
| a few years passed | |||
| 2012-04 | 6544 | 665,493 | 340 |
After 4 months, the users are finding new ways to use the wiki - we now have our production release information and technical user groups are storing minutes of meetings on the wiki. At first I was sceptical about using the wiki for minutes but it has worked very well because they are linking the minutes to other articles.
After 9 months, we have found that the most read pages are being kept the most up to date and thereby fulfilling our prophecy of self-healing doucmentation. The crap pages are not being read and not kept up to date and so do not matter as much.
After 16 months, the initial surge of page growth has passed. The wiki is now the defacto standard for the IT department's "temporary" documentation. The business non-tech areas have not taken to it even though they have had a failed sharepoint installation in the last 6 months - most likely because they simply do not have the culture to share detailed notes and docs.
After 4.5 years - it is still going strong. We trashed the Sun servers and it now runs on Redhat linux blades. It is one of the few systems in the organisation that people fight over. there's no turf war because no one really controls it!!
System Details
edit- 2x Sun V220 servers (live and DR) running Redhat (was a dell workstation before!)
- installed with:
$ yum install httpd mysql mysql-devel mysql-server php php-ldap php-mysql ntp openldap-clients php-mbstring ImageMagick