Why Mediawiki?

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11th July 2018 - Rob Kay

In order for AUKC to get best value out of the work that I'm doing, I've been aware from the start that there will be a need to document a large proportion of the work. For example, with Charitylog, as well as actually configuring the system, I need to write down how it's been configured - so that in future, AUKC's IT person(s) can make sense of it all.

Also, the staff and volunteers need documentation in order to actually use the system. Some of this will be covered by Charitylog's own manual, but it will be useful to have crib sheets/help guides for new starters/etc - specific to AUKC - held somewhere that everyone can access them.

The question is, where to put all of this? There are various possibilities -

  • local server (a file on the M drive or something).
    • Pro: easy to maintain, free
    • Con: difficult to interlink documents, not available outside the office
  • intranet - Sharepoint or similar
    • Pro: flexible, probably free since we're going to end up with Office 365 anyway
    • Con: generally comes with a heavy workload for admin
  • mediawiki - my chosen solution
    • Pro: suits more of a read-only, "knowledgebase" style, easy to interlink documents/pages, easy to embed picture/video content, easy to maintain
    • Con: some cost, because it has to live on a server somewhere

I've used Mediawiki before when I wrote the first version of Charitylog's own manual and I think it's the ideal solution for this. When we recruit the in-house IT person, I'm confident I can train them easily on Mediawiki within a day.