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Re: [svlug] Wiki for documentation

To: "Robert Wohleb" <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, HumLUG <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [svlug] Wiki for documentation
From: "Nathan Young" <nyoung@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 17:03:28 -0800
Hi.

I've used twiki, mediawiki and confluence. I've used twiki a lot more than either of the others.

Confluence _looks_ great and has lots of nice wiki->blog, tagging and notification features available right out of the box. It has some nice formatting and reporting macros for doing simple stuff, and it looks like the community for extensions and plugins is active. It scales well for an extended environment where you want to use one server to set up a whole bunch of wikis for different groups.

Although twiki is a very good general purpose wiki tool, it excels in one area, which is the single biggest reason we use it over other packages. It allows you to add structure to wiki topics. Basically, in addition to the one big text edit box where you can edit the text contents of the topic, you can have a large variety of other form elements. Sets of data elements, their size, presentation and simple rules about what they can contain can be defined in one topic, then associated with a number of other topics. Each topic the form is associated with will then have those fields of meta data in both browsing and editing view. There are plugins that give you decent (but not great) querying tools to build reports around data captured this way.

We use it to give a really great mid-point between the free for all of wiki and the structure of a DB-drvien web app. The way it works in twiki makes it super easy to implement new forms. It's quite flexible in some ways and not so flexible in others. For us it was a sweet spot between structure and ease.

I haven't found other wikis that have a comparable mechanism. Many have template that you can use as a starting point for a topic but then they lose their "template"-ness after the first edit. Confluence has the start of what seems to be an equivalent but you need administrative access to install it, it's a beta plugin, and looks crippled in important ways.

---->Nathan





On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 21:44:18 -0800, Robert Wohleb <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I introduced MediaWiki as an intranet website for a startup I'm involved in. People picked up the editing of the wiki really quickly and it's been pretty successful for discussions. MediaWiki supports image/media file uploads and Tex mathematics formatting which has allowed us to easily document our technology, production, and marketing strategies.

For those that don't know, MediaWiki is the same wiki software that runs Wikipedia.

~Rob

John Hauser wrote:
interesting thread on wikis over at svlug specifically for in-house documentation for engineers to use.
good discussion of the varous choices out there and their strengths.
i thought some humlug members may be interested in this topic...

http://gw.jhauser.dyndns.org:8080/archives/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=svlug&i=43E2B517.7090702%40biovalid.com




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Nathan Young
N. C. Young Design
(530)629-4176
http://ncyoung.com

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