Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki
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So @art_of_shred and I are working on testing out MediaWiki for use for IT documentation. We all know that this works as tons and tons of companies do it, but we want to do it right and this is a test to see if it will work well for us. In order to do that well, we need to organize it efficiently so that the wiki is easy to use, easy to search and makes logical sense.
Does anyone have any guidance or recommendations as to a good way to organize documentation in the wiki? In our case, this is an ITSP / MSP wiki that will be used for blended internal and client documentation including diagrams, network descriptions, scripts, code, you name it. We need to be able to organize and sort by customer, but have it make sense for internal use as well, although NTG could be treated simply as a customer in that case, so that might just make best sense there.
We are coming from a few years of using OneNote files on SharePoint for this task, but want something more robust and less expensive as MediaWiki scales incredibly well. I'll post another thread about alternative documentation options.
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We have an internal MediaWiki server as well, but it's used for a different purpose (not it).
I'd recommend organizing the content as explained here.
Use names spaces, similar to tags on ML, but usable inside of the content, not just at the top post.
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Wow, yeah, tons of good info here: https://cmsreport.com/articles/tutorial-organizing-wiki-content-using-mediawiki-3793
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Categories might work like the tags that I want. Check these out:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories
So, if a page is about support for "Exchange at Andy's House of Flapjacks" we could mark that page as being in the Exchange and Andy's House of Flapjacks Categories.
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Yep, exactly. The name spaces and the categories are for similar things, to get more detailed the more you search.
Using just categories will really leave you wanting though.
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So what you'd likely want to do is make names spaces for the things you support.
Using Exchange as a name spaces will then allow you to sort everything related to exchange. And under that you'd have Andy's flap jack house as a category.
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@DustinB3403 said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
Using Exchange as a name spaces will then allow you to sort everything related to exchange. And understand you'd have Andy's flap jack house
As an MSP, that doesn't work, though, because we aren't producing general documentation for Exchange, but for a customer's implementation of it. So seeing all customer's Exchange stuff in the same name space would be essentially useless and nearly nothing would apply in the same situation. But what belongs to a customer would always be that customer. So a customer name space would likely make sense.
Namespaces are like folders, the group things together in "hard" ways.
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@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@DustinB3403 said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
Using Exchange as a name spaces will then allow you to sort everything related to exchange. And understand you'd have Andy's flap jack house
As an MSP, that doesn't work, though, because we aren't producing general documentation for Exchange, but for a customer's implementation of it. So seeing all customer's Exchange stuff in the same name space would be essentially useless and nearly nothing would apply in the same situation. But what belongs to a customer would always be that customer. So a customer name space would likely make sense.
Namespaces are like folders, the group things together in "hard" ways.
Well ignore the exchange example, using your customer name would work well.
But do you not see the value in sorting the content based on the implemented solution as well?
IE Andy's flap jack house as a main names space and then exchange for Andy's flap jack house...
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@DustinB3403 said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
But do you not see the value in sorting the content based on the implemented solution as well?
That's what the category is for.
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@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@DustinB3403 said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
But do you not see the value in sorting the content based on the implemented solution as well?
That's what the category is for.
They can be, but using namespaces means you have to add custom entries (something I'm sure you're not afraid to do) but still extra work.
Categories are much easier to make, and do allow you to focus in on a specific subject matter. Namespaces are strictly for Andy's Flap Jacks.
So while this might be a worthwhile effort, I think it would be a lot to maintain...
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Here "brianna.laugher at gmail" has a good description of the uses of each. 3rd post down.
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...And we've already abandoned MediaWiki for DokuWiki for page security reasons.
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Here's my $5-6/month/user account with OneNote online
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https://i.imgur.com/Gq1cJCV.png
I appear to have full access OneNote from my browser in my $5-6/m/u account.
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Here's the free OneNote on my android with my Business account added showing both of the OneNote things in the list.
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Yeah, but we can't access that. It's $20 for us. That's just the price, can't get around it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
Yeah, but we can't access that. It's $20 for us. That's just the price, can't get around it.
If you're really planning on dropping all the way to the $4/u/m exchange only plan, then you can probably move to the $5/month plan (you have less than 250 users, right? and get what I have today.
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@Dashrender said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:
Yeah, but we can't access that. It's $20 for us. That's just the price, can't get around it.
If you're really planning on dropping all the way to the $4/u/m exchange only plan, then you can probably move to the $5/month plan (you have less than 250 users, right? and get what I have today.
MSP, doesn't work that way. We need our E3 plans. Seriously, we don't have any option for the $5 stuff.
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If we were a normal company that could use the $5 plans, we'd already be on them and using that. But even when we had OneNote, we were not too impressed with it. It was just "good enough." Now we are looking for something actually good.
