User:Ofbeaton/Corporate

Is MediaWiki the right choice for my company or organization?

MediaWiki is not a corporate solution
MediaWiki is not produced for a corporate audience and mainly deals with open, public-facing websites. It should be understood that it's use in a corporate environment will require a significant investment in development and should not be treated as an out of the box solution. Many private wikis have a significant amount of customization done to them, do not upgrade often and unfortunately, have not contributed their changes back to the community. You will undoubtedly end up recreating a lot of this work to get MediaWiki up to par in your workplace.

Why choose MediaWiki
Despite how much MediaWiki caters to the needs of Wikipedia, it has grown into a very stable, basic core. Using MediaWiki you will get a sense of rolling your own, able to customize it to your particular needs and requirements with no-one dictating how you should organize or enter information. One of MediaWiki's strongest strength is as a framework from which to extend and customize. It's a blank slate.

By using MediaWiki you also have a proven, working high-volume client who is transparent about how they run MediaWiki and what their stack looks like. If you need to scale, you can always follow the example of Wikipedia to see how they are doing it. The problem has been solved, it's not an unknown.

Contribute back
Before we go further, we ask that you have a serious discussion with your employer and company about contributing any changes you make back to the community. It is only to your benefit to release your extensions, skins, widgets, custom css/javascript and core patches back into the community. Not only will the community help you maintain them, improve them and test them, but you will be promoting an environment where corporations help each other out, in the end helping you out as well. By having the code in the community, it is more likely to be kept up to date with changes in the core, and upgrading the core of your wiki will become easier.

Other options
There are many options available to you should you decide MediaWiki is not right for you.