Using Wiki Software for Small-Scale Collaboration

At my company the development team is currently making heavy use of Wiki technology to allow us to easily share and edit documents with each other. A wiki essentially lets you edit content directly on the web server without having to upload HTML files or keep track of a local file tree. So, for example, you can go to a site like WikiPedia, click the 'edit' link, and suddenly you can make whatever changes you like to the page. The wiki software also helpfully keeps track of revisions people make, so if some unthinking soul deletes everything you just have to click the 'rollback to previous revision' button and the damage is undone.

We're finding this model very useful for editing and fixing up each other's work. We also don't seem to have any trouble with people feeling like they 'own' a piece of material. Everyone works on everyone else's stuff, to improve it and look for mistakes, and everyone also then has a better understanding of the overall project.

I was thinking about downloading the 1.4 beta version of MediaWiki, the collaboration software that powers WikiPedia. Beta software generally means unfinished but usable, but just in case people don't get their hopes up too much they included the following disclaimer:

This is a beta release; while most things are working, there are some

known problems and probably unknown problems. Don't run a public site

on this beta unless you're willing to help with investigating and

fixing any problems you encounter.



CARELESS USE OF THIS CODE MAY RENDER YOU STERILE, GROW WEEDS IN YOUR

YARD, AND FEED YOUR CAT TO A SEWER ALLIGATOR. DON'T SAY YOU WEREN'T

WARNED, CAUSE WE WARNED YOU.

I'm still considering it, so long as it runs slightly faster than the stable version.

At least MediaWiki is a heck of a lot faster than TWiki, the one we have currently going to do our online document and knowledge sharing. TWiki runs purely in Perl with no database back-end and the performance shows that maybe there really is something to this data storage optimization stuff.

MediaWiki, on the other hand, uses MySQL which is quite fast and easy to set up on Mac OS X. MediaWiki isn't quite as flexible, syntax-wise, as TWiki, but I'm sure none of us will ever really need the elaborate expression parsing that it gives you. And I find it so frustrating to have to wait for 5 seconds for one page to load that I often don't bother putting something on the wiki when I should. Hence the need to upgrade to faster software.
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