Instead of MediaWiki, I went with DokuWiki, which I found to be much simpler to manage (DokuWiki, e.g., does not require an SQL database back end).

Unfortunately,my experience was not as positive as yours as I am pretty much the only one that ever contributed to the site. Other lawyers in my firm by in large could not be bothered. Now that I am in-house, I still use a personal wiki that runs on my own office computer system to manage my information. I love knowing that I can go to one place to find all the information I need. I even have i-frames pointing to network share drives where the admins keep important stuff so I don’t have to navigate through Windows Explorer.

Great post.

I thought about MediaWiki for the internal wikis I’m setting up in the new firm, but elected to go instead with the Wiki Server built into Mac OS X Leopard Server. I’ve got an all Mac network, powered by an XServe file server. It is currently serving up 7 different wikis (law practice, tech, firm admin, etc.). For each wiki, you can set up access privileges by group, user, etc.

So far, the speed and stability of the wiki server are wonderful. No issues at all. The biggest advantage of the Apple product – a true WYSIWYG interface for wiki authoring and editing – is also it’s biggest downfall. While it does give you what-you-see functionality, it is not as clean and crisp as we’ve become accustomed (it feels a bit chunky, for lack of a better term, and the ’see’ part is a little squirrelly sometimes).

So far, I’d characterize it as an extremely powerful 1.0…and I’m looking forward to growing with the product. WYSIWYG, imho, is the key to getting better wiki adoption throughout the firm.

And, of course, it requires that you run a mac server. Not something many firms are willing to do.

Give me some time and I’ll do a write-up on the Podcast Capture/Producer apps in Leopard Server. These, imho, are game-changing apps in the wiki/blog/km world.

Here’s Apple’s brief write up of the wiki server app:
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/wikis.html

@Steve – having no WYSIWYG editor can really be an obstacle in getting acceptance for a Wiki. We implemented the FCK Editor in our MediaWiki installation at work and it really helped. Just look at mediawiki.org for the extension – the installation is simple and you will need a realtively new mediawiki version.

The reason I went with MediaWiki was to keep it as simple as possible…figuring that clicking “edit” (and learning a few rules (e.g., how to create a bulleted list, how to link to a web page, etc)) was probably easier for my crew than learning a CRM.

If Wikipedia had more of a WYSIWYG editor built into it…then it would be even easier for non-geeks to adopt. That’s always the trick…trying to find something no more complex than email (to maximize the chances that people will learn to use it).

Thanks for the comment.

Steve