Tell me about using a wiki for documentation!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Tell me about using a wiki for documentation!

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; Eat me a lot of bread

I've been considering pitching a wiki documentation system to upper management at my company. We're a pretty small engineering firm, on the order of maybe 100 employees (maybe 40% manufacturing, 30% overhead/management, and 30% design/engineering). I'd like to move us to using a wiki system for our internal documentation, and potentially also for generating some customer-facing documents (used with some kind of nice export engine).

I've been evaluating both Dokuwiki and Mediawiki on my sandbox LAMP server (as well as a couple of smaller ones like MoinMoin and foswiki), but I haven't picked a clear winner yet. Somebody else told me that I should try Confluence.

Has anybody here ever undertaken a similar project? Does anybody's company use a wiki for its internal (or external!) documentation?

Which wiki engine did you use? Were there any sorts of organizational problems? How do you organize/keep track of all of the freakin' pages (especially on Mediawiki, which is a flat hierarchy)?

Tell me about your experiences!

# ? Feb 1, 2013 08:40

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# ? May 23, 2013 21:10

BurgerQuest: Mar 17, 2009

We've moved to confluence and I think it's pretty great. The main reason is that it makes templating really easy, and none of us have time to get an open source product configured with templates how we'd like. It integrates nicely with MS Office and SharePoint and licencing is pretty cheap.

We started with mediawiki, the drupal with some basic templates for common article types and now confluence.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 10:13

Wasse: Jan 16, 2010

We use dokuwiki internally, which is great for a wiki. But I feel like to push it out to much more then that, it starts to fall down.

We recently looked at some other options - including mindtouch, Twiki. But it doesn't feel like we'd be getting much more by switching.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 11:49

peak debt: Mar 10, 2001; b& :(

Poopernickel posted:

How do you organize/keep track of all of the freakin' pages (especially on Mediawiki, which is a flat hierarchy)?

With categories. Think of it like GMail. Instead of hierarchical folders you use labels (categories).

# ? Feb 1, 2013 13:41

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; HYPER-THREADING

Wasse posted:

We use dokuwiki internally, which is great for a wiki. But I feel like to push it out to much more then that, it starts to fall down.

We recently looked at some other options - including mindtouch, Twiki. But it doesn't feel like we'd be getting much more by switching.

I got a dokuwiki going so we can store stuff in one place - all the developer stuff only one or two guys know. Trouble is getting the other guys to use it...

# ? Feb 1, 2013 13:45

ghostinmyshell: Sep 17, 2004; I am very particular about biscuits, I'll have you know.

I implemented Mediawiki for the company, back in 2008 and here were the main problems at the time. I am sure some of this is fixed by better plugins right?

1) People found it difficult to edit pages.
2) Adding plugins to fix issues like the above started to make maintaining it more complex.
3) Adding security to each page was reliant on the page editor. If someone removed the security group tag from the code, the page was exposed to the whole company. I could manage wiki security with AD, but everyone still had access to every page, so I needed this plugin to tag a page with the security group with the access level.
4) Old people still wrote their items in PDFs/Word and just created a wiki page with a link to it on their file share.
5) People don't document anything or enough.
6) You have to have someone keep on it all the time to prune out garbage and outdated information. I didn't mind this task much but it still consumes time.
7) Office integration. "What do you mean I can't paste my excel document into this poo poo?"

Finally I had a IT mental breakdown and just put up a SharePoint Search server to point at the file share with all our documents.

I stopped giving a poo poo about document management because of no money and as a failure I couldn't convince people that this was important. I drink every night and to stop thinking about outdated information, duplicate files, folder trees 10 levels deep, upper case file names, names with underscores. As long as I document my work for myself it's good enough for me now.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 15:12

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; HYPER-THREADING

ghostinmyshell posted:

1) People found it difficult to edit pages.
2) Adding plugins to fix issues like the above started to make maintaining it more complex.
3) Adding security to each page was reliant on the page editor. If someone removed the security group tag from the code, the page was exposed to the whole company. I could manage wiki security with AD, but everyone still had access to every page, so I needed this plugin to tag a page with the security group with the access level.
4) Old people still wrote their items in PDFs/Word and just created a wiki page with a link to it on their file share.
5) People don't document anything or enough.
6) You have to have someone keep on it all the time to prune out garbage and outdated information. I didn't mind this task much but it still consumes time.
7) Office integration. "What do you mean I can't paste my excel document into this poo poo?"

Finally I had a IT mental breakdown and just put up a SharePoint Search server to point at the file share with all our documents.

To be fair, Sharepoint only fixes about 2 of those things.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 15:31

peak debt: Mar 10, 2001; b& :(

The new Sharepoint has the nice feature that you can edit Excel and Word files directly in Sharepoint (using some sort of Office-365 web app integration). I've only ever seen that properly implemented once at a customer but it was pretty awesome since you didn't have to check out any document to make changes, you could double-click, change a cell, and save.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 15:49

hieronymus: Sep 14, 2004; i keep my word and i will kill you like i said
killing me? thats impossible for anyone

ghostinmyshell posted:

I implemented Mediawiki for the company, back in 2008 and here were the main problems at the time. I am sure some of this is fixed by better plugins right?

1) People found it difficult to edit pages.
2) Adding plugins to fix issues like the above started to make maintaining it more complex.
3) Adding security to each page was reliant on the page editor. If someone removed the security group tag from the code, the page was exposed to the whole company. I could manage wiki security with AD, but everyone still had access to every page, so I needed this plugin to tag a page with the security group with the access level.
4) Old people still wrote their items in PDFs/Word and just created a wiki page with a link to it on their file share.
5) People don't document anything or enough.
6) You have to have someone keep on it all the time to prune out garbage and outdated information. I didn't mind this task much but it still consumes time.
7) Office integration. "What do you mean I can't paste my excel document into this poo poo?"

Finally I had a IT mental breakdown and just put up a SharePoint Search server to point at the file share with all our documents.

I stopped giving a poo poo about document management because of no money and as a failure I couldn't convince people that this was important. I drink every night and to stop thinking about outdated information, duplicate files, folder trees 10 levels deep, upper case file names, names with underscores. As long as I document my work for myself it's good enough for me now.

Old people don't like having other people edit their documents because other stupid old people will go and make changes that they don't like or factually incorrect. This will result in wiki civil wars and really annoying meetings.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 16:18

ming-the-mazdaless: Nov 30, 2005; Whore funded horsepower

Bob Morales posted:

Trouble is getting the other guys to use it...

Wikis have such great paper potential. Unfortunately, I've never encountered one that has maintained "stickiness" within the teams meant to be updating.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 16:36

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; Eat me a lot of bread

ghostinmyshell posted:

I implemented Mediawiki for the company, back in 2008 and here were the main problems at the time. I am sure some of this is fixed by better plugins right?

1) People found it difficult to edit pages.
2) Adding plugins to fix issues like the above started to make maintaining it more complex.
3) Adding security to each page was reliant on the page editor. If someone removed the security group tag from the code, the page was exposed to the whole company. I could manage wiki security with AD, but everyone still had access to every page, so I needed this plugin to tag a page with the security group with the access level.
4) Old people still wrote their items in PDFs/Word and just created a wiki page with a link to it on their file share.
5) People don't document anything or enough.
6) You have to have someone keep on it all the time to prune out garbage and outdated information. I didn't mind this task much but it still consumes time.
7) Office integration. "What do you mean I can't paste my excel document into this poo poo?"

Finally I had a IT mental breakdown and just put up a SharePoint Search server to point at the file share with all our documents.

I stopped giving a poo poo about document management because of no money and as a failure I couldn't convince people that this was important. I drink every night and to stop thinking about outdated information, duplicate files, folder trees 10 levels deep, upper case file names, names with underscores. As long as I document my work for myself it's good enough for me now.

It's like I can see my future in this post!

If you were to go back to past-life you and make some recommendations to make it work on a department-wide level, what would they be? Note that 'department-wide' in this instance is 5 or 6 people, but half of them are the perpetually-5-years-from-retirement people.

Poopernickel fucked around with this message at Feb 1, 2013 around 17:42

# ? Feb 1, 2013 17:28

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; Eat me a lot of bread

Wasse posted:

We use dokuwiki internally, which is great for a wiki. But I feel like to push it out to much more then that, it starts to fall down.

We recently looked at some other options - including mindtouch, Twiki. But it doesn't feel like we'd be getting much more by switching.

Bob Morales posted:

I got a dokuwiki going so we can store stuff in one place - all the developer stuff only one or two guys know. Trouble is getting the other guys to use it...

What dokuwiki plugins do you guys use? I've been messing around with my sandbox dokuwiki pretty extensively, and I generally like it a lot. I'm a fan of the file-based storage concept, since that means I could back it up with rsync or source-control the entire website.

One of the things I've noticed about Dokuwiki though, is that it seems like the namespaces are a little half-cooked. Do you guys use their namespaces much for page organization?

What do you do when you need to move a bunch of pages from one namespace to another (or is that even an issue which comes up)? What about renaming or moving the namespaces? I know this can be done inside of the filesystem, but I'd like a solution that everybody can use.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 17:36

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; Eat me a lot of bread

BurgerQuest posted:

We've moved to confluence and I think it's pretty great. The main reason is that it makes templating really easy, and none of us have time to get an open source product configured with templates how we'd like. It integrates nicely with MS Office and SharePoint and licencing is pretty cheap.

We started with mediawiki, the drupal with some basic templates for common article types and now confluence.

Did you get much adoption by other users with mediawiki? How about with confluence? My company is full of people who are near retirement and set in their ways, which leads to a TON of:

\\share\project\name\daves_documents\proposals\
\\share\project\name\daves_documents\proposals_old\
\\share\project\name\daves_documents\do_not-Use_putdated\
\\share\project\name\daves_documents\proposal_1.doc
\\share\project\name\daves_documents\proposal_1_dave.doc
\\share\project\name\daves_documents\proposal_3_dave_oldversion.doc
\\share\project\name\daves_documents\newproposal_3_dave_oldversion.doc

etc.

Is confluence worth shelling out the money for? How much screwing around with it did it take to get to a point where people like to use it (did you guys reach that point)? Would you trust it with generating 'professional' documents like proposals or user manuals? Or is is best used as an internal system only?

# ? Feb 1, 2013 17:41

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

At a certain point, I literally think hiring a part-time secretary (there's some outsourced options that work on an hourly, on-demand basis too I believe) that manages all the collaboration will be cheaper and more cost-effective than using software for people that just aren't going to figure out how to use software effectively, I really, really mean it. Business software like Sharepoint is expensive and unless you have to start hiring 20+ secretaries it's not going to go so well. "Old people" are more productive with old ways probably because they'll be averse to trying to change the way they've worked for 30+ years with no disruption and if they're that close to retirement there's no personal incentive for them to actually want to change that workflow. The only way that can happen is if you happen to make it "fun" and I really doubt you're going to make collaborating on spreadsheets as fun as golfing or shooting the breeze at a spa.

hieronymus posted:

Old people don't like having other people edit their documents because other stupid old people will go and make changes that they don't like or factually incorrect. This will result in wiki civil wars and really annoying meetings.

The same old people seem totally cool with sidebar comments and edit marks in Word though. If there's a way to make edits look like that to the old people while letting people that aren't afraid of technology and collaborating "at the speed of modern business" do things with less red tape, that'd be a nice feature. Oh, and I don't think Sharepoint is necessarily the answer to this either given it's prohibitively expensive for so many places and because every place I've been with old people and Sharepoint has just made things even worse for collaboration because of usability issues.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 18:01

Italy's Chicken: Feb 25, 2001; cs is for cheaters

Poopernickel posted:

What dokuwiki plugins do you guys use?

Check out jcapture. It uses java, but will instantly do the following:
1) take a screenshot or video.
2) upload your captured media to whatever namespace you're working in.
3) insert the link to your captured media at your cursor position.
It literally leaves no excuse for people to not take screenshots or even a video of whatever they are supposed to document.

Has anyone ever come across a good plugin or method for importing MS Word files into DokuWiki? I've found lots of annoying ways to do it which involve a 20 step process.

# ? Feb 4, 2013 05:03

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; Eat me a lot of bread

Italy's Chicken posted:

Check out jcapture. It uses java, but will instantly do the following:
1) take a screenshot or video.
2) upload your captured media to whatever namespace you're working in.
3) insert the link to your captured media at your cursor position.
It literally leaves no excuse for people to not take screenshots or even a video of whatever they are supposed to document

Sweet! I'll try this out.

# ? Feb 5, 2013 17:04

Comradephate: Feb 28, 2009

ming-the-mazdaless posted:

Wikis have such great paper potential. Unfortunately, I've never encountered one that has maintained "stickiness" within the teams meant to be updating.

I mostly find it tough to get things going in the first place. Once it's been "seeded" sufficiently, it becomes a lot easier to convince people to keep things updated.

Poopernickel posted:

Is confluence worth shelling out the money for? How much screwing around with it did it take to get to a point where people like to use it (did you guys reach that point)? Would you trust it with generating 'professional' documents like proposals or user manuals? Or is is best used as an internal system only?

It's for internal stuff for the most part. Goonfleet just switched from ~12 different mediawiki installations to a single Confluence install, because Confluence has excellent support for configuring permissions and different "spaces", if that's something that will benefit you at all. It also has a strong concept of page hierarchy and the plugins are all internally managed, so there's less fracturing and nonsense to deal with. I was not involved with the setup, but I can say that it's easy as balls to use. Editing can be done like a normal word processor (though MW markup can be enabled as well).

# ? Feb 6, 2013 04:49

Wasse: Jan 16, 2010

Poopernickel posted:

What dokuwiki plugins do you guys use? I've been messing around with my sandbox dokuwiki pretty extensively, and I generally like it a lot. I'm a fan of the file-based storage concept, since that means I could back it up with rsync or source-control the entire website.

One of the things I've noticed about Dokuwiki though, is that it seems like the namespaces are a little half-cooked. Do you guys use their namespaces much for page organization?

What do you do when you need to move a bunch of pages from one namespace to another (or is that even an issue which comes up)? What about renaming or moving the namespaces? I know this can be done inside of the filesystem, but I'd like a solution that everybody can use.

Not anything too significant - but here is what we seem to have:

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:dw2pdf
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:batchedit
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:orphanswanted
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:pagemove
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:usersubscriptions

# ? Feb 6, 2013 11:02

Wasse: Jan 16, 2010

Italy's Chicken posted:

Check out jcapture. It uses java, but will instantly do the following:
1) take a screenshot or video.
2) upload your captured media to whatever namespace you're working in.
3) insert the link to your captured media at your cursor position.
It literally leaves no excuse for people to not take screenshots or even a video of whatever they are supposed to document.

Has anyone ever come across a good plugin or method for importing MS Word files into DokuWiki? I've found lots of annoying ways to do it which involve a 20 step process.

That sounds pretty awesome. Thanks. I just forwarded it over to the guy that does the actual management of the wiki; I figured he wouldn't be too happy if I just dropped a plugin and broke something on him, especially as he's asleep right now

# ? Feb 6, 2013 11:03

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

I have thought about this many times too. I tried to implement a Wiki once at my company, and it failed like any other documentation project.

Now, we use TFS' built-in Sharepoint site, and people upload Word documents and Excel sheets. There's no problem with people renaming or adding _new or _old versions, as you click to open the file directly in Word/Excel, and the document is then uploaded to the site as you save. Pretty neat to be honest.

Note that we've long given up trying to implement code documentation (I think it's a waste of time), and only document very, very broad elements of our system/architecture, release planning, and of course people write "temporary" documents used in the development stage of new projects.

# ? Feb 6, 2013 15:28

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# ? May 23, 2013 21:10

caberham: Mar 18, 2009; So I'm back up in the game
Running things to keep my swing
Letting all the people know
That I'm back to run the show

Comradephate posted:

It's for internal stuff for the most part. Goonfleet just switched from ~12 different mediawiki installations to a single Confluence install, because Confluence has excellent support for configuring permissions and different "spaces", if that's something that will benefit you at all. It also has a strong concept of page hierarchy and the plugins are all internally managed, so there's less fracturing and nonsense to deal with. I was not involved with the setup, but I can say that it's easy as balls to use. Editing can be done like a normal word processor (though MW markup can be enabled as well).

This is hilarious

My video gaming space guilds are more organized. technology and collaborative than my office. There's no modern IT or anything here, so can you guys elaborate on what I can do with wikis?

Product data?
HR policies
?? Anyways, would like to keep an eye on this thread

# ? Feb 22, 2013 07:05

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