An Agreeable Wiki

Story of their Intranet Wiki

Darren Chase

We had a woodpile

Our Scenario

• Large library staff
• Diverse knowledge and expertise
• Wide variety of projects
• Communication is compartmentalized

Our original intranet was a woodpile

• Shared windows folders on network drives
• Woodpile: we knew where all the wood was, but finding a specific piece…

Our needs, desires, and secret wishes

Wanted: fast, cheap miracle

• Collaboration
• Documentation/policies
• Troubleshooting/FAQs
• In-house control
• Web accessible
• Organization
• Ease of use

Kaleidoscope of options

• Keep the woodpile: shared files (PDF, Word, Excel)
• Static HTML pages
• CMS (content management system)
• Blog
• Wiki

And the winner is… WIKI

• PhpWiki
• DokuWiki
• Kwiki
• WikiWikiWeb
• MediaWiki
• Twiki
• Compare Wikis: http://WikiMatrix.org

Chose Twiki – it’s superfantastical

Why we *Heart* Twiki:

• easy editing
• Access control
• File locking
• Webs
• Revision control
• Plug-ins

Building Twiki

• Linux (can work on other systems, this is what they had)
• Apache
• Perl 5.8
• Perl modules (instead of SQL/databases)
• Plug-ins

Refreshing wiki

Implementation is done. Training and buy-in depends on staff support.

Effective support builders:

• Make it easy to join & use
• Keep it simple
• Must be “real world”
• Hands-on training
• Continuing wiki refreshment