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MediaWiki + UTORAuth for internal IT knowledgebase

Submitted by Michael OCleirigh on June 9, 2009 - 10:28am

I've been using MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org) on an internal network server since 2007 and it has really helped in growing the written down IT knowledge of my group. I find it especially useful in that you do not need to have a preconceived structure to start with you can just add new content as you perform complicated tasks that you think might be useful to have the steps to in the future.

As content develops you can wire it together with index pages or categories.

There was a previous posting on a code snippet repository and for small programs a wiki is perfect (especially with the syntax highlighting plugin).

A wiki could be used as a first step towards a more elaborate and custom code sharing application. i.e. provide some base content to drive the discussion and requirements/design.

But I see a central IT knowledge base as a useful tool in sharing the IT related initiatives that people are working on and howto style configuration documentation.

MediaWiki is written in PHP and there are a lot of extensions and the ability to create new ones.

There is a LDAP extension that I think should allow it to be connected to UTORAuth which could be used to restrict access to the IT subset of staff users (does such a subset exist?).

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I definitely agree that a

Submitted by Brett on June 10, 2009 - 12:01pm.

I definitely agree that a Wiki would be a great idea. At a conference last June I attended a talk by someone in Texas whose University had moved over to Wiki documentation for not just IT but for everything and it turned out quite well after people got over the initial adjustment.

Others here know that I've been talking about U of T needing to implement an IT Wiki here for awhile, but unfortunately I don't have the time or a spare server to host it on to do so.

UofT Wiki

Submitted by Brad Armstrong on June 15, 2009 - 1:33pm.

The Information Commons Helpdesk area has one in place. It seems to have a very broad range of IT related material. Search function works well. The search returns quite a number of hits and quotes can narrow that down.

I like it.

http://help.ic.utoronto.ca/index.html

To Wiki or not to Wiki

Rouben's picture
Submitted by Rouben on June 10, 2009 - 1:13pm.

Having some experience with wikis, both technical and otherwise, I have some comments...

  • While MediaWiki tends to be a once size fits all solution, there is a number of different implementations that come in all shapes and sizes... I suggest digging deeper before settling with any particular product. An example for a wiki that would be very useful to developers would be Trac or DrProject. The neat thing about these is that they include lots of developer-friendly features, like a wikified bug tracker, milestone tracker and most importantly, source code repository browser (SubVersion).
  • Most end-users feel that the markup language of wikis is too daunting and end up not using it. I don't find it daunting, in fact I find it quite simple, certainly simpler than HTML... but that's me.
  • Content management in a wiki is quite the art. As usual there are way too many options to organize content, and they vary greatly depending on what you're trying to accomplish. My suggestion is to take it easy with categorizing, because that's the first thing people tend to do and in the end it's not very useful. We would also need dedicated folks who would volunteer to maintain and clean up the wiki. This could be a collective (crowdsourcing) effort to some extent, but a more coherent content management team is almost always necessary and beneficial.
  • Speaking of indexing... MediaWiki's own built-in search is quite bad. We should keep Google in mind when indexing content. Why reinvent the wheel?
  • UTORauth can be done quite easily, with or without PubCookie. And LDAP's not even necessary. I have (and can show you) the code. :)

Agreed

Michael Moncada's picture
Submitted by Michael Moncada on June 10, 2009 - 1:45pm.

MediaWiki is definitely a good choice but there are some limitations to the extent to its usefulness in terms of development. I have used both MediaWiki and Trac and find both to have their strengths and weaknesses. Trac and Dr Project (written in Python I believe) are useful as they combine both SVN functionality along with a Wiki but is more low level and less user friendly (perhaps that has changed with recent versions?).

MediaWiki provides an overall useful avenue for publishing documentation, but its strengths lie in information and media publishing rather than the development type of stuff. You could potentially use both, leveraging the more developmental aspect of Dr Project and the glossier packaged MediaWiki to handle the user/developer (higher level) design and concept documentation. Of course this would mean you would have to maintain two sites creating links between the two (and actually force yourself to keep it updated) which will require more effort in terms of its administration and maintenance.

LDAP? forget that! Do it via PAM

Don Banh's picture
Submitted by Don Banh on June 15, 2009 - 10:36am.

Rouben and myself have a great deal of experience on how to link UTORauth --> kerberos --> PAM --> "whatever you like" on a UNIX/Linux platform.

We are happy to showcase how this is done.

You know ...

Submitted by p-dot on June 15, 2009 - 3:39pm.

That would probably make for a great article on the TKF web site! (HINT HINT HINT) :)

Looking forward to it

Submitted by Mike Serafin on June 18, 2009 - 2:20pm.

I'd love to see how this is done, please share. :)

Wikitext

Submitted by tfburton on June 26, 2009 - 6:00pm.

At the company I work for we have done something very similar, and I just wanted to throw in that I love the way wikitext works. I can use html if I want, I can use wikitext if I want, and we added FCKeditor in for those that want a text editor feel. No down side and plenty of upside.

It's a date

Don Banh's picture
Submitted by Don Banh on June 18, 2009 - 11:03pm.

I'm not in much liberty in posting the solution mainly for security purposes. However, maybe we can setup a showcase/demo for all parties that are interested.

I would be interested in

Submitted by Mike Serafin on June 25, 2009 - 9:01am.

I would be interested in attending this if it goes forward. :)

Rouben is currently away on

Don Banh's picture
Submitted by Don Banh on June 25, 2009 - 10:10am.

Rouben is currently away on vacation. Let's see if we can do this mid July.