[wplug] Wikis (was: Administration of Lots of Machines)

[Michael Semcheski]

Jonathan Billings wrote:
> I like a Wiki, or some other tool that keeps revision control.  That
> way, you can see the history of a procedure, and who's recently made
> changes/additions.

Alex wrote:
> I don't know if the web engineers here at Orrick (the Wheeling GOC of
>  www.orrick.com) are using Linux to serve, but I've been encouraging
> and teaching the use of a wiki (openwiki.com) here for documentation
> of "institutional knowledge"...and its really cool!


I think the Wiki is a great invention.  I setup MediaWiki for our
department, and it has been very well received.

We use our private wiki to keep track of new things everyday (all of it
falling under "organizational knowledge").  Our set of pages more
closely resembles a tree than a set of interconnected pages.  Things
tend to be organized hierarchically.  So, we have manuals for our
different competencies.  The articles that compose the manual tend to
diverge.  Not that that's a bad thing, but its different from wikipedia.

Another thing I'm encouraged by is that more than a few users make an
effort to update our calendar and our address book pages.

Probably 95% of the pages have been created by three people out of 30. 
But its an improvement (before, one person was responsible for all of
the information on our web site.)

We'd considered doing some short seminars for our lab members on how to
contribute to the wiki, but our decision was to let it grow organically
for now and see what happens.

Mike