User: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.

See my discussion page on how to work with company LDAP number-based usernames

Overview
The 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:
 * After 2 months, we have 101 users, 23,098 page views, 3,719 page edits and 625 total pages in the database.
 * After 4 months, we have 126 users, 51,296 page views, 7,917 page edits and 973 total pages in the database.
 * After 9 months, we have 188 users, 159,000 page views, 23,000 page edits and 2,200 total pages in the database.
 * After 16 months, we have 212 users, 222,935 page views, 32,395 page edits and 2,673 total pages in the database.

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.

System Details

 * 2x Sun V220 servers (live and DR) running Redhat (was a dell workstation before!)
 * installed with: