Enterprise use of MediaWiki

This is a page for coordinating various community efforts for using MediaWiki by corporations, non-profits, community projects, etc. Essentially any use of MediaWiki software outside of Wikimedia Foundation projects.

MediaWiki is a simple, powerful and free solution to produce a wiki web site in an enterprise.
 * 1) No fee to the MediaWiki development community,
 * 2) No fee for the server software by using open-source Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP,
 * 3) Designed to distinguish between the IT role, responsible for the servers (backup, accessibility, security, upgrade) and wiki-administration role, responsible for the wiki functionalities and behavior (appearance, user rights, user preferences, javascripts, maintenance).
 * 4) Designed to produce wiki families. (E.g. a top wiki for first level information connected to further restricted specialized wikis).
 * 5) Designed to be easily extended and easily developed. extensions have already been produced, such as LDAP Authentication,


 * See Sites using MediaWiki and MediaWiki testimonials

Enterprise MediaWiki Resources
The formative stages of trying to build an enterprise MediaWiki community began at an Enterprise MediaWiki BOF at Wikimania 2006.


 * Mailing List
 * A mailing list was created in August, 2006 to discuss enterprise issues. It's currently a low traffic list, so feel free to join and introduce yourself:
 * http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-enterprise archive


 * IRC
 * There's not a dedicated IRC channel to enterprise issues, but the best thing to do if you'd like to discuss this is to pop onto the #mediawiki IRC channel to discuss. Make sure that robla is paying attention if he's logged on (for example, by typing "/msg robla there's enterprise stuff on #mediawiki")


 * Other channels
 * See the MediaWiki Communication page for more options.

Issues for MediaWiki in the enterprise

 * See Manual:System administration to get everything about MediaWiki system administration.

Below are issues for users of MediaWiki in an enterprise setting. Some issues below aren't typically a problem for public Internet deployments of MediaWiki, while others are, but may not be as acute as they are for enterprise users.

Authentication
Most public Internet deployments of MediaWiki use the standard authentication database as configured in MediaWiki. However, enterprise deployments typically need to tie into the corporate login structure. Here are some resources that help you deal with that:


 * Ryan Lane's LDAP Authentication plugin - since LDAP systems are so common in enterprise systems.
 * AuthPlugin interface - generic interface for creating new authentication plugins.

Limiting access
See Manual:Preventing access

 Here are just a few examples of ways of accessing content:
 * Page transclusion
 * Export hooks
 * Page history
 * Searching

If page names are meant to be confidential (e.g. "super secret contract between Foo Corp. and Bar Corp."), that just makes matters worse.

One suggestion from the Wikimania BOF:
 * You might set up a hot mirror. Point authors at the master wiki with htaccess protection, point users at a read-only mirrors.  Once you set it up, maintenance is trivial.  This tells how to mirror the OpenZaurus wiki: http://wiki.openzaurus.org/Admin/MirrorHowto .  You may be able to adapt these instructions to set up your own master and any number of read-only mirrors.  My mirrors update nightly; updates up to every 10 minutes should be feasible depending on the number and size of your pages.  Contact me if you have any questions: mailto://bronson@rinspin.com

One subject for discussion on the mediawiki-enterprise mailing list is what interfaces could be added to the code such that an ACL-maniac extension to MediaWiki could exist, without a big support burden on the core team. 

External Authorization plugins

 * What this means: being able to manage group memberships in external database rather than in internal database
 * Not really being done (?)
 * How to do it: override User.php?
 * Other hooks?
 * OpenID is in MediaWiki svn. It's live at http://wikitravel.org/review/Special:OpenIDLogin
 * Page by Page Access Control using Access Control Extension for MediaWiki · PageSecurity extension. See Category:Page specific user rights extensions

New distribution mechanisms

 * Debian package for MediaWiki
 * RPM (?)
 * Does a PEAR distribution make sense?
 * Does it make sense to package MediaWiki extensions as .deb/.rpm/PEAR thingies?
 * I mentioned automating maintaining multiple instances using svk during the talk. It works well.  I will try to write an article about it in the next few days; check http://u32.net or bug me: bronson@rinspin.com
 * New distribution mechanisms. There's already a Debian package for MediaWiki, I'm assuming there's an RPM out there.  Does a PEAR distribution make sense?  Does it make sense to package MediaWiki extensions as .deb/.rpm/PEAR thingies?

Structured data in enterprise use

 * Wikidata
 * Semantic MediaWiki
 * Wikicalc http://softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/
 * WikiDB


 * Structured data - I know that in my last job, there were several things we used a wiki in lieu of a database for (e.g. we kept a list of new licensees of our technology on a wiki). It was nice, because we had the flexibility to add fields willy-nilly.  So, it may be interesting to discuss the enterprise applicability of projects like

Easy editing with WYSIWYG editing
In many corporations, especially larger corporations, wikitext is often preceived as a barrier. To help offset the potential learning curve associated with wikitext, the following extensions provide toolbars to help people more easily use wikitext.
 * See Category:WYSIWYG extensions and especially Extension:FCKeditor (Official)

Other stuff

 * Marking stable/approved versions of articles: ''see Category:Rating extensions and especially Extension:FlaggedRevs
 * Training
 * Possibility to replicate to a local system. This is needed to Consultants with no access from the customersite to the Company Wiki: see Manual:Moving a wiki
 * MediaWiki as a Document Management System: Version management, archiving, search, categorization...
 * Navigation: see Category:Navigation extensions and especially Extension:Hierarchy

Platform solutions

 * OmCollab platform
 * OmCollab is a bundle with MediaWiki, Wordpress, bookmarks and forum. ( See also: MediaWiki LocalSettings on OmCollab installation )